Biology involves working with organisms that, like infants, need attention at specific times.
Other companies, including Amyris Biotechnologies of Emeryville, Calif., and LS9 of San Carlos, Calif., are working on organisms that will make fuel if fed sugar from corn or cellulosic sources, but Joule's bacterium does not require any sugar.
Susan Lindquist, former Director of the Whitehead Institute, is a more conventional experimental geneticist, working with organisms, and here is what she has to say: "Most people think of genetics as being only about DNA.
We overcame challenges faced by investigators working with organisms with unsequenced genomes through informatics approaches that significantly enhanced the annotation of the X. laevis GeneChip®.
This total cost makes the discovery of SNPs attainable for many researchers working with organisms for which limited funding is available.
A difficulty when working with organisms where the entire genomic sequences are not known is to estimate confidence in whether the number of sequence variants (alleles, paralogues) detected does reflect all variation within the organism.
This is particularly challenging for research communities working on organisms that lack the basic infrastructure of a sequenced genome, or an efficient way to utilize whatever sequence data may be available.
This is largely because at the scale needed to uncover rare developmental transcripts, Sanger-based EST sequencing quickly becomes technically and financially prohibitive for many labs working on organisms with smaller research communities.
The creature is a siphonophore, which is the scientific name for a community of organisms working together to resemble a single organism.
But this technique had been used only on small microbial genomes; many researchers were skeptical that it would work for organisms with more DNA.
