Podcasts - DOE Joint Genome Institute (original) (raw)
The JGI launched two podcasts in March 2020. Check out these audio stories, complete with transcripts.
Genome Insider hosted by Menaka Wilhelm
“Genome Insider” is a podcast that showcases the work of JGI collaborators in brief forays, connecting audiences with the people behind the science. Hear diverse voices in science talk about their groundbreaking research to better understand — and harness — the superpowers encoded in plants, fungi, microalgae, environmental viruses, and bacteria to contribute to a more sustainable world. Learn about JGI-supported projects, delving into the researchers’ motivations, the insights that amaze them, and how their work contributes to solving energy and environmental challenges.
Natural Prodcast hosted by Dan Udwary
“Natural Prodcast” is a “fireside chat”-style podcast about natural products and the science and scientists of secondary metabolism. Natural products, secondary metabolites, and specialized metabolites all refer to the chemicals that make species unique and different from one another. They are incredibly important to medicine, the environment, and human health. As the JGI acts on its goals in — and builds out its capabilities for — secondary metabolism research, “Natural Prodcast” serves as an important line of communication to the scientific community. Host Dan Udwary talks to luminaries in the field about current and future developments, and how the JGI can be part of that space.
Recent and Past Podcasts from JGI
Listen to all the latest episodes of Genome Insider and Natural Prodcast.
Genome Insider is available on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify, iHeart Radio, and TuneIn Radio – Subscribe today! Natural Prodcast is available on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, and Spotify – Subscribe today!
- Genome Insider S5 Episode 4: Gotta Catch ‘Em Gall (8/1/2024) - 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 trees to raise their young in structures called galls. In this episode, hear from Kasey and Patrick about how this project unfolded, and how they worked with the JGI's metabolomics program to find out more about these weird little pods.
- Genome Insider S5 Episode 3: A Redesign for Yeast’s Genome, Chromosome by Chromosome (6/28/2024) - 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 yeast’s native chromosomes with synthetic versions. This project has turned out to be an international collaboration, with some artistic endeavors along the way. Eventually, the goal is to create an entirely human-generated yeast genome.
- Genome Insider S5 Episode 2: Forest Fungi, Seagrass, and a New View of Symbiosis (6/13/2024) - Three stories of JGI-supported research, connected to nutrient cycles. Francis Martin and Lucas Auer discuss their work on the community of forest floor fungi. Allison Joy looks into seagrass meadows' carbon sequestration with insights from Adam Healey and Xiao Ma. And Karen Serrano and Benjamin Cole explain their research on the symbiotic relationship between mycorrhizal fungi and plant roots.
- Genome Insider S5 Episode 1: What Happens To a Rainforest When You Dial Up Drought? – Linnea Honeker and Malak Tfaily (5/30/2024) - Together, the JGI and EMSL have supported researchers who are using an enclosed mini-Earth — Biosphere 2 — to better understand how rainforest soil microbes could contribute to carbon cycling and climate resilience.
- Genome Insider S4 Episode 8: The Megadata of Lake Mendota – Part 3: Boating Out to David Buoy (12/21/2023) - This is the third and final episode of our series on a giant metagenome assembly from Wisconsin’s Lake Mendota. This episode is a look at how researchers get these specialized snapshots of a freshwater ecosystem.
- Genome Insider S4 Episode 7: The Megadata of Lake Mendota – Part 2: Souped Up Computing (12/7/2023) - 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 with the assembler program MetaHipMer2. Oak Ridge National Lab is home to two supercomputers — Summit and Frontier — that process terabytes of data with MetaHipMer2. But nearby the JGI, a cluster called Dori is also capable of running smaller MetaHipMer assemblies — so we head there for a sense of what this supercomputing looks like.
- Genome Insider S4 Episode 6: The Megadata of Lake Mendota – Part 1: Many, Many Mers (11/21/2023) - 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 understand how the freshwater ecosystem works. So a few years ago, when they set out to analyze 500 metagenomes, it was the biggest project the JGI had ever put together. The next 3 episodes are the story behind that giant assembly from Lake Mendota. In this episode: the software evolution that made metagenome assemblies like this possible.
- Natural Prodcast Episode 24 – Jackie Winter and SMC (11/16/2023) - Natural Prodcast focuses on the JGI Secondary Metabolism Collaboratory (SMC), a new data portal for natural product biosynthetic gene clusters.
- Genome Insider S4 Episode 5: Experimenting with EcoFABs for Student Labs – Jill Bouchard & Ying Wang (11/9/2023) - 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 growth chambers let researchers around the world compare their work consistently. And EcoFABs also work well in the classroom. This episode, we visit Los Medanos College to see EcoFabs in action in Jill Bouchard’s BIO 21 lab course.
- Natural Prodcast Episode 23 – Aaron Puri (11/2/2023) - Aaron Puri of the University of Utah on carbon-fixing methylotrophs, quorum sensing, and inverse stable isotopic labeling to explore biosynthetic chemistry.