Microbes, thriving in even the world’s most extreme environments, are capable of performing myriad biological functions, learned over the billions of years they have inhabited the planet. Those lessons, and how they can be captured to render clean renewable sources of energy and to repair damaged environments, are among the many secrets encoded in their DNA sequence. On May 23, at the general meeting of the American Society of Microbiology (ASM), the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (DOE JGI) will announce that it has finished the sequence of 100 microbial genomes and released this information for the benefit of the global research community.
