Scientific and Community News

If you find the Chlamydomonas genome useful in your work, please consider acknowledging the Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute by including this statement in your manuscripts and posters: “The work conducted by the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy under … Continued

We have learned from Paul Levine that Bill Ebersold, one of the pioneers of genetics in C. reinhardtii, died on July 25. The following notice was posted on the UCLA web site: 07/28/2009 – PROFESSOR WILBUR T. EBERSOLD PASSES AWAY Former friend and colleague “Bill” Wilbur T. Ebersold passed away Saturday 25 July after an … Continued

From Susan Dutcher: The Chlamydomonas gene-finder, GreenGenie2, is now online. It was trained on Chlamydomonas EST sequences and shows excellent short-sequence prediction accuracy. Input sequences are limited to 150Kb. It has several new user-friendly features. (Kwan, Kulp, Dutcher, and Stormo, (2009) BMC Genomics 10: 210). -Exon highlighting and underlining (for black and white printing) -Translated … Continued

Those of you who have the new Chlamydomonas Sourcebook, second edition, are probably aware that the “companion web site” for this volume at Elsevier is still a garbled mess. We’ve been trying since early December to get this fixed, without success. George Witman and I have therefore created an alternative site at http://www.chlamy.org/companion.html that provides descriptions … Continued

A new on-line ordering form and secure on-line payment site are now working. A shopping cart-based order system is under construction and should be up soon. Among the new acquisitions are the artificial miRNA plasmids recently described by Molnar et al. [PMID: 19054357]. See the plasmid list for additional information.

Ralph Lewin, whose work with Chlamydomonas began in the 1940s, died on November 30 at age 87. A lengthy and very nice obituary is posted on the web site of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

The Chlamydomonas Sourcebook, Second Edition, is now available for purchase from Elsevier Science and Technology. From the home page, a search for “Chlamydomonas” will retrieve the information on how to order. The three volumes can be purchased individually, or as a set.

A draft genome of Chlorella sp. NC64A is now available at the JGI browser. See http://genome.jgi-psf.org/ChlNC64A_1/ChlNC64A_1.info.html for details of the project. There is also a web site dedicated to Chlorella and chlorella virus genomes: http://greengene.uml.edu/

The Chlamydomonas Genome Reveals the Evolution of Key Animal and Plant Functions, by Sabeeha Merchant, Simon Prochnik, et al. appears in the October 12 issue ofScience. Please see the press release at JGI for additional information. More press releases: National Science Foundation UCLA, including a very nice photo of Sabeeha Merchant Carnegie Institution CNRS

The Joint Genome Institute is pleased to announce the public release of the Volvox carteri genome. Our annotation includes the 1265 scaffolds and 138 Mbp of the 8.1x assembly and we predicted 15,544 genes, with the following average properties: Gene length 5269 nt Transcript length 1833 nt Protein length 558 aa Exon frequency 7.78 exons … Continued