Bio Saga Blog - A Chronicle of Life Sciences & Informatics

The Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute has chosen 41 research projects out of 152 applicants to use its sequencing services under its 2012 Community Sequencing Program, JGI said Thursday. Researchers for this year's CSP program, which provides the scientific community with access to JGI's high-throughput sequencing technologies, proposed projects to study plant-microbe interactions, how microbes are involved in carbon capture and greenhouse gas emission, and metagenomics. “These selections truly take advantage of the DOE JGI’s massive-scale sequencing and data analysis capabilities,” DOE JGI Director Eddy Rubin said in a statement.  “The projects span the globe and the unexplored branches of the tree of life, and promise to yield a better understanding of the interplay between climate, ecosystem, and organism.  Still other projects are targeting improvements in biofuel feedstock production, focusing on the potential of microorganisms to improve feedstock growth a...

A team of researchers led by investigators at the Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute reported online today in Science that they have sequenced the first amphibian genome : that of the Western clawed frog Xenopus tropicalis . The international research team used shotgun sequencing to generate a draft version of the X. tropicalis genome, which they then compared with the human and chicken genomes. In the process, they found more than 20,000 protein-coding genes in the frog genome, as well as regions of synteny with humans and chickens, and a slew of transposable element sequences. And because amphibians diverged from the amniote lineage leading to mammals, birds, and reptiles some 360 million years ago, senior author Daniel Rokhsar, a researcher affiliated with JGI and the University of California at Berkeley, and his co-authors explained, information in the X. tropicalis genome is helping to reconstruct features found in the shared ancestor of these anima...