What does uncovering the true authorship of plays attributed to Shakespeare have to do with identifying our genetic ancestors or classifying new life forms? All involve the comparative analysis of long sets of data and all will benefit from a unique new analytical tool developed by researchers at Berkeley Lab called “feature frequency profiles.”

An innovative DNA microarray developed at Berkeley Lab is shedding light on what’s killing the world’s coral reefs. The tool, which catalogs the swings in microbial populations associated with disease, may help scientists learn how to preserve one of the ocean’s most important denizens.

Integrated Microbial Genomics with Microbiome Samples (IMG/M) is a powerful computational tool for understanding metagenomics, the collective genomes of communities of microorganisms. IMG/M will soon be expanded to include metagenomic data from humans, opening insights into how microbial communities in the human body maintain, threaten, or otherwise affect our health.

Berkeley Lab scientists have analyzed the remarkable genome of a bacterium constituting the first single-species ecosystem. Desulforudis audaxviator was discovered 2.8 kilometers beneath the surface of the earth in a South African gold mine, where it exists in complete isolation, total darkness, a lack of oxygen, and 60-degree-Celsius heat.

Contact: Paul Preuss, (510) 486-6249, paul_preuss@lbl.gov

BERKELEY, CA — Three years ago, “ultraconserved elements” were discovered in the genomes of mice, rats, and humans. These are DNA sequences 200 base pairs in length or longer — some are over 700 base pairs long — showing 100-percent identity among the three species. They have been [...]

Contact: Paul Preuss, (510) 486-6249, paul_preuss@lbl.gov

BERKELEY, CA — Not so long ago, the difficult-to-sequence, highly repetitive, gene-poor DNA found in regions of chromosomes known as heterochromatin was called “junk.” Like dark matter in the universe, the true nature of heterochromatin was unknown.

A diagram of Drosophila’s centromeric heterochromatin, which extends toward the center of the chromosomes [...]

Contact: Paul Preuss, (510) 486-6249 paul_preuss@lbl.gov

BERKELEY, CA — The National Institutes of Health (NIH) today (May 14) announced the first grants in a four-year, $57 million effort to identify the functional elements in the genomes of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster and the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans.

The National Human Genome Research Institute has awarded grants to [...]

Contact: Paul Preuss, paul_preuss@lbl.gov

Two hours after the egg is fertilized, the embryo of Drosophila melanogaster reaches the blastoderm stage, during which the future fruit fly’s development is a hotbed of activity. Some 6,000 distinct nuclei in the egg’s single cell migrate to the surface, where they are enveloped by membranes and, within about half an [...]

Contact: Paul Preuss, paul_preuss@lbl.gov

Fruit flies are only a couple of millimeters long, and even close up they don’t look much like people. So if you’re a researcher who wants to learn something about genetics in human development and disease, why would you bother with Drosophila melanogaster?

Drosophila melanogaster is an invaluable model organism, partly because [...]

Contact: Paul Preuss, paul_preuss@lbl.gov

As normal cells turn cancerous and develop into tumors, their genomes accumulate tell-tale changes. Some changes involve gene amplification, meaning they accumulate multiple copies and cause genes to overexpress the proteins they code for. Other changes involve gene deletion, which leads to reduced gene expression. Many of these changes may affect genes [...]