Genome Insider

The Path to Plant Pangenomes

Pangenomes are a powerful resource for understanding crops. They bring the wide view of a panorama to genomic understanding, surfacing more ways to link traits to specifi

A Spectrum of Sorghum

This year, the JGI helped a collaborative team produce a pangenome for Sorghum bicolor — a collection of many, many sorghum genome sequences. Lined up and analyzed consis

The Mobilome in the Mire

For years, researchers have known that many datasets miss a key part of microbial genomes: the mobile genetic elements, or MGEs, that can move between organisms. But now,

SIPs with Standards

Stable Isotope Probing (SIP) is a powerful technique for studying microbial communities. These experiments can show which microbes are handling specific nutrients, or wha

Adopt-A-Genome

In this episode, undergraduates adopt genomes that the JGI sequenced, but never published in the literature. These students analyze the genomes, write reports, and publis

Gotta Catch 'Em Gall

Kasey Markel and Patrick Shih (UC Berkeley and the Joint BioEnergy Institute) are looking for new ways to engineer plants. So they’ve looked into wasps that program oak t

A Redesign for Yeast’s Genome, Chromosome by Chromosome - Jef Boeke, Weimin Zhang & Leslie Mitchell

To engineer yeast to do more, and understand genomes in general, Jef Boeke, Weimin Zhang (NYU Langone Health) and Leslie Mitchell (Neochromosome) have worked to replace y

Forest Fungi, Seagrass, and a New View of Symbiosis

Three stories of JGI-supported research, connected to nutrient cycles. Francis Martin and Lucas Auer discuss their work on communities of forest floor fungi. Allison Joy

What Happens To a Rainforest When You Dial Up Drought? - Linnea Honeker and Malak Tfaily

Rainforests store a big fraction of all the carbon on Earth, and soil microbes play a key role in pulling that carbon out of the atmosphere. This episode, researchers tak

The Megadata of Lake Mendota - Part 3: Boating Out to David Buoy

This is the third and final episode of our series on a giant metagenome assembly from Wisconsin’s Lake Mendota. In the last two episodes, we’ve covered the specialized so

The Megadata of Lake Mendota - Part 2: Souped Up Computing

This series is the story of a giant metagenome assembly from Wisconsin’s Lake Mendota. In this episode: a look at the supercomputing that stitches together large datasets

The Megadata of Lake Mendota - Part 1: Many, Many Mers

Lake Mendota sits right next to the University of Wisconsin, Madison. And Trina McMahon's lab has been sampling the microbes of that lake for over 20 years, to under

Experimenting with EcoFABs for Student Labs - Jill Bouchard & Ying Wang

To set up flexible, repeatable experiments on plants and microbes, Trent Northen’s group at Berkeley Lab created a fabricated ecosystem – an EcoFAB. These small plastic g

JGIota: A Surprise for Chloroflexota — The First Flagella!

To understand how organisms adapt to extreme environments, Marike Palmer and Brian Hedlund study organisms living in hot springs. Hear how their recent work revealed more

JGIota: A Tool to Find the Nomadic Genes that Help Microbes Adapt - geNomad

A quick snippet on Antonio Camargo and Simon Roux, a few of the JGI researchers behind software that finds plasmids and viruses within microbial genomes. As mobile geneti

Methane Makers in Yosemite's Lakes - Mike Beman and Elisabet Perez Coronel

Meet researchers who have hiked, rafted and met local wildlife (a marmot!) as they’ve sampled the microbial communities living in the mountaintop lakes of the Sierra Neva

A Shrubbier Version of Rubber - Andrew Nelson and Colleen McMahan

Right now, our natural rubber comes from just one tree species: Hevea brasiliensis. It’s great at producing latex that becomes rubber, but it’s vulnerable to disease and

The Busy World of Deep Sea Eruptions - Anna-Louise Reysenbach and Emily St. John

The ocean depths are vast and dark. But there are hotspots on the ocean floor — underwater volcanoes and hydrothermal vents — where lively microbial communities thrive, a

Crops as Tough as World Cup Turf - James Schnable and Guangchao Sun

In our warming world, we’ll need corn, sorghum and other crops to grow well in worse conditions: with more heat, less water and less fertilizer. Grasses do better in thes

Season 4 Trailer (and sneak peek!)

On June 8th, Genome Insider is back! We've got a batch of 4 new episodes where researchers discover the expertise encoded in our environment — in the genomes of pl