New find from Joint BioEnergy Institute could help reduce biofuel production costs

Without fungi and microbes to break down dead trees and leaf litter in nature, the forest floor might look like a scene from TV's "Hoarders."

A 79-year-old collection of fungal cultures and the U.S. Forest Service's Northern Research Stationare part of a team that will sequence 1,000 fungal genomes in the next 5 years.

From the North Pole to the Arctic Ocean, the frozen soils within this region keep an estimated 1,672 billion metric tons of carbon out of the Earth's atmosphere.

According to roadside signs, the number of burgers served has eclipsed the billion mark, while the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Joint Genome Institute (JGI) will now serve up trillions of nucleotides of information from scores of newly-selected projects geared to feed the data-hungry worldwide research community.