[caption id="attachment_28852" align="alignright" width="300"] Candida krusei, a form of yeast that is known to be drug-resistant and able to cause opportunistic infections in humans[/caption] What’s in a name? Too much, when it comes to the taxology of yeast, it turns out. Scientists from University College of Dublin have found that two distinctly named species of yeast are in fact 99.6% identical at the base pair level, and collinear. In other words, they are the same species. It was a bit of a shock, especially considering one of the yeast species, Pichia kudriavzevii, is commonly used in food production and classified…
[caption id="attachment_28544" align="alignright" width="300"] SMRT Art: Jewelry created from upcycled SMRT cells by Olga Pettersson.[/caption] When was the last time you sent your DNA off to a day at the spa? Olga Pettersson of the SciLifeLab at Uppsala University lets her molecules relax for up to a week at room temperature to enable them to untangle, achieve better chemical purity, and better sequencing output. It was one of many practical pointers shared by presenters at the popular three-day gathering of PacBio users in Leiden, Netherlands last month. SMRT Leiden featured the scientific discoveries and analytical achievements of more than 30…
[caption id="attachment_26599" align="alignright" width="300"] Haemophilus influenzae, a sample of which was deposited to the NCTC collection by Alexander Fleming, from his own nose.[/caption] The genomes of 3,000 strains of bacteria, including some of the deadliest in the world, are now available to researchers as part of an ambitious project by the UK’s National Collection of Type Cultures (NCTC), in partnership with the Wellcome Sanger Institute and PacBio. Plague, cholera, streptomyces, and 250 strains of E. coli, are among the reference genomes created, as well as all ‘type strains’ of the bacteria in the collection -- the first strains that describe…
[caption id="attachment_24073" align="alignright" width="300"] Rice coral (Montipora capitata) growing over Porites lobata. Credit: Dr. Dwayne Meadows, NOAA/NMFS/OPR[/caption] Corals are critical to sustaining sea life in many parts of the world, contributing to an elaborate ecosystem that lives in and around their mineralized calcium carbonate skeletons. In addition to hosting photosynthetic endosymbionts in exchange for energy, corals harbor a diverse microbial community. What role does this microbial metagenome play in the health of the coral reef, especially during thermal challenges induced by climate change? Alexander Shumaker of Rutgers University will get a chance to investigate this question, thanks to long-read sequencing…
[caption id="attachment_23152" align="alignright" width="300"] Aspergillus ochraceus[/caption] The Department of Energy has its eyes on an unassuming solution to our bioenergy needs: Aspergillus. The fungal genus contains hundreds of variations, which include powerful pathogens, industrial cell factories, and prolific producers of bioactive secondary metabolites. The DOE’s Joint Genome Institute (JGI) has embarked on an ambitious plan to sequence, annotate and analyze the genomes of 300 Aspergillus fungi, and the first results are in. In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “Linking secondary metabolites to gene clusters through genome sequencing of six diverse Aspergillus species,” a team…