A week of brain biggering  I got to spend last week in sunny
California. I forgot how wonderful it is to sit and eat lunch
outside! I was participating in a workshop held at the
Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Institute (JGI). The
workshop was entitled Microbial Genomics and Metagenomics.
Basically I spent the week learning about different tools that
are available to help biologists deal with the data flood that
has come out (and continues to flow faster and faster) of
sequencing technologies that continue to get faster and cheaper.
Since microbes are not exactly easy to observe with ones eyes,
microbiologists rely heavily on genetic data to tell us about
our organisms of interest. For environmental microbiologists,
whose organisms can not currently be grown in the lab, knowing
what genes our “bugs” contain tells us what processes they might
be capable of and can also provide information into their
evolutionary history. We can extract the total DNA out of a soil
sample and begin to get a picture of what