Each year, the Berkeley Lab Director’s Achievement Award program recognizes outstanding contributions by employees to all facets of Lab activities. Several Biosciences Area personnel are among the 2022 honorees.
JGI Helps Develop Computational Pipeline for RNA Virus Sequences
In the journal Cell, scientists from a team led by researchers at Tel Aviv University in Israel, the National Center for Biotechnology Information, and the DOE Joint Genome Institute (JGI) describe a computational pipeline that can specifically scan for RNA virus sequences.
JGI Helps Shed Light on How Antarctic Algae Have Adapted to Cold
In Nature Ecology and Evolution, researchers from the Chinese Academy of Fishery Sciences, the University of East Anglia, and the JGI have explored the genome of the polar algae Microglena sp. YARC. The green alga harbors extra genes for proteins requiring zinc, and those genes turn out to be key for the phytoplankton’s ability to live in cold polar waters. Learn more here on the JGI website.
JGI Helps Uncover How Climate Change Threatens the Base of Polar Oceans’ Food Webs
The cold polar oceans give rise to some of the largest food webs on Earth. And at their base are microscopic, photosynthetic algae. But human-induced climate change, a new study suggests, is displacing these important cold-water communities of algae with warm-adapted ones, a trend that threatens to destabilize the delicate marine food web and change the oceans as we know them.
The JGI Community Sequencing Program enabled the discovery of these worrisome circumstances for algal communities. Click here to read the news release on the JGI website.
Microbial Fingerprints for Cities
Vibrant cities around the world are made up of a unique blend of cultures, languages, cuisines, and – as scientists recently revealed – microbes. Nearly 1,000 scientists from around the world, including three from Berkeley Lab, collected and analyzed microbial samples from public transit stations across 60 global cities. They probed ticket kiosks, benches, and rails to see what tiny organisms like bacteria, viruses, and archaea were in residence.
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