What You Saw in the News: 2012 was the year of the microbiome. Feature stories about the trillions of microbes found in our environment and on/in human bodies appeared in publications such as The Economist, the New York Times, The Scientist, The New Yorker, Wired, Scientific American, and Discover. The NIH’s Human Microbiome Project published a report in Nature. The Earth Microbiome Project held its first international conference, which took…
On Nov. 1, ISB and San Diego-based Sapphire Energy announced a strategic partnership to apply systems biology to algae with the goal of significantly increasing oil yield and improving resistance to crop predators and environmental factors in order to further the advancement of commercialized algae biofuel production. “Together, we have complementary expertise that will allow us to understand, reverse engineer and rationally alter the gene networks for fuel production in…
