Daily Archives: January 9, 2013

STI Genome Exhaust (drive past)
Stock exhaust with STI Genome rear silencer

By: Gro0ar

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STI Genome Exhaust (drive past) - Video

STI Genome Exhaust (drive off)
Stock exhaust with STI Genome rear silencer

By: Gro0ar

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STI Genome Exhaust (drive off) - Video

Public release date: 9-Jan-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Laura Crozier crozier@dbi.udel.edu 302-831-3424 University of Delaware

Two prominent microbiologists have launched a new peer-reviewed publication focusing on microbiome research in environmental, agricultural, and biomedical areas. Eric Wommack, from the University of Delaware's College of Earth, Ocean and Environment and Jacques Ravel, from the University of Maryland School of Medicine's Institute for Genome Sciences are the Editors-in-Chief of Microbiome, a BioMed Central (BMC) publication, which launched its first issue this week.

The new publication reflects the growing importance of the need for studying communities of microorganisms microbiomes and their functions in their natural environment whether that environment is the human body, the ocean, or any other habitat.

"Microbiology was once thought of as two exclusive subdisciplines clinical microbiology and environmental microbiology but the substantial technological advances, particularly over the past decade in DNA sequencing and analysis, have given scientists new common and interdisciplinary research interests," explains Ravel, who is studying the effect of the human microbiome on women's health, and is part of the NIH-funded Human Microbiome Project (HMP).

"Microbiome will facilitate the cross-fertilization of ideas, research methods and analyses, and theory between clinical and environmental microbiologists exploring the emergent impacts of microbial communities on the ecosystems they inhabit," says Wommack, a University of Delaware professor who researches the inner workings of microbial communities.

The central purpose of Microbiome is to unite investigators conducting research on microbial communities in environmental, agricultural, and biomedical arenas. Topics broadly addressing the study of microbial communities, such as, meta-genomics surveys, bioinformatics, other '-omics' approaches and surveys, and community/host interaction mathematical modeling will be covered.

The new issue of Microbiome features several innovative research papers from scientists at various institutions worldwide. For example, a team from the University of Guelph in Canada, summarized their novel stool substitute transplant therapy research. The team treated two patients with Clostridium difficile using a bacterial strain cocktail in an attempt to alleviate this difficult infection of the lower GI tract. Other innovative genomic research approaches are also featured in the first issue.

The journal includes a new section, "Microbiome Announcements," that will contain short reports describing microbiome datasets and their associated clinical or environmental data.

Jacques Ravel, is a professor of microbiology and immunology and associate director for genomics at the Institute for Genome Sciences (IGS) at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. IGS scientists have pioneered studies in microbiome research and are continuing to be at the forefront of the human microbiome project. Eric Wommack, is a professor of environmental microbiology in the Departments of Plant and Soil Sciences, Biological Sciences, and the College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment at the University of Delaware.

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Genome scientists launch Microbiome journal

New sequencing data challenges prior thinking that sponges were the most ancient animals in evolutionary history

By Amy Maxmen and Nature magazine

The ancestors of comb jellies such as Mnemiopsis leidyi may be the earliest creatures in the animal kingdom. Image: William Browne/Univ. of Miami

Animals evolved gradually, from the lowly sponge to the menagerie of tentacled, winged and brainy creatures that inhabit Earth today. This idea makes such intuitive sense that biologists are now stunned by genome-sequencing data suggesting that the sponges were preceded by complex marine predators called comb jellies.

Although they are gelatinous like jellyfish, comb jellies form their own phylum, known as ctenophores. Trees of life typically root the comb jellies' lineage between the group containing jellyfish and sea anemones and the one containing animals with heads and rears which include slugs, flies and humans. Comb jellies paddle through the sea with iridescent cilia and snare prey with sticky tentacles. They are much more complex than sponges they have nerves, muscles, tissue layers and light sensors, all of which the sponges lack.

Its just wild to imagine that comb jellies evolved before sponges, says Billie Swalla, a developmental biologist at the University of Washington in Seattle and a leading member of the team sequencing the genome of the comb jelly Pleurobrachia bachei. But the team is suggesting just that, in results they presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, held on 37 January in San Francisco, California.

Despite comb jellies' complexity, DNA sequences in the Pleurobrachia genome place them at the base of the animal tree of life, announced Swalla's colleague Leonid Moroz, a neurobiologist at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Another team presented results from genome sequencing for the comb jelly Mnemiopsis leidyi, and found that the phylum lands either below, or as close to the base as, sponges on the tree.

Weve always thought that predatorprey interactions and sensory adaptations evolved long after the origin of sponges, Swalla says. Now we need to imagine early life as a sponge, ctenophore and everything in between. Because millions of species have gone extinct since animals appeared some 542 million years ago, Swalla says, the ancestor of all animals might look different from modern comb jellies and sponges.

Gene families, cell-signaling networks and patterns of gene expression in comb jellies support ancient origins as well. For example, Moroz and his team found that comb jellies grow their nerves with unique sets of genes. These are aliens, Moroz jokes. He suggests that comb jellies might be descendants of Ediacaran organisms, mysterious organisms that appear in the fossil record before animals. Indeed, in 2011, paleontologists claimed that one of these 580-million-year-old fossils resembled comb jellies.

Andy Baxevanis, a comparative biologist at the US National Human Genome Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, and a leader on the Mnemiopsis genome project, says that comb jellies are the only animals that lack certain genes crucial to producing microRNA short RNA chains that help to regulate gene expression. Moreover, he points out, sponges and comb jellies lack other gene families that all other animals possess.

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Genome Reveals Comb Jellies' Ancient Origin