Ashleigh Papp: Hi, this is Ashleigh Papp from the Strategic Communications team at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Today, I’m with Nigel Mouncey, the Director of the Joint Genome Institute, a user facility in the Biosciences Area — we’re going to spend a few minutes talking about how the JGI supports the world’s scientists. 

Nigel Mouncey: So the US Department of Energy really has a very robust science basis, both for fundamental basic science, discovery science, as well as more applied science. And this spans across a huge range of scientific disciplines. And within all of these disciplines are a total of 28 user facilities that really bring together technologies, capabilities at a scale and a complexity that would be very hard for an individual institution to be able to support. These are facilities that generate very large scale amounts of data, have, you know, very advanced equipment, and also centralized expertise to run that equipment and help all of the users of these facilities get the best out of those capabilities in order to advance their science.

Papp: Right now, the Joint Genome Institute has about 2500 users with active projects. And then there are many more thousands of users that utilize the data that’s generated by the JGI. 

Mouncey: All of our work is really focused on genomics. And by that, I mean, the sort of blueprint of life: DNA, RNA, and you know, everything that encodes all life on Earth. We do very large scale DNA sequencing, and that is basically reading the genetic code. We do large scale DNA synthesis, which is sort of writing the genetic code, and allows us to, very precisely, be able to investigate [the] function of genes, of proteins, pathways of organisms. And then we also do very large scale metabolomics, the compounds that organisms produce, that they use in order to grow to be able to produce other compounds, be able to survive in different environments. And so we bring all of these capabilities together to understand biology at this, you know, genetic scale. 

Papp: JGI specifically focuses on bacteria, fungi, algae, viruses, and plants … Because a lot of valuable information resides in the genetic makeup of these living things. 

Mouncey: In order to be able to use biology for really important societal things, like coming up with new ways to power airplanes, new materials that you might use to build homes, new ways to be able to grow food in different areas and protect food from, you know, different pests and even by extension, some of our work can actually help power the discovery of new medicines.

We are, though, really focused on all that sort of very early fundamental discovery — what biology is out there, what does it do? And then how we might be able to go and harness that for improving our lives. 

Papp: JGI users span the gamut (and the planet) — they’re professors and students at universities and other national labs, and also industry-based scientists. Researchers submit proposals that outline their project ideas and if the merit of the work aligns with the DOE mission, they’re accepted and the JGI carries out genomic sequencing and analysis free of charge. And then there’s a whole other group of scientists who also benefit from the JGI’s work.

Mouncey: These folks can go on to our data portals … For different areas of biology, they can freely go in and download the data, play with the data, analyze the data. In many cases, we are the largest repository of high quality data. We spend a lot of time curating our data, and our data is really trusted by people.

Papp: And in today’s fast-paced world, the JGI is always keeping in mind where science and technology are headed next, so that they can continue to best serve their users.  

Mouncey: There’s lots about biology that we don’t understand. There’s lots of data that we’ve collected that we look at through a single lens most times. But what if we were able to do this across different types of data, even more broadly, and start to fill in the gaps where we haven’t yet generated the data? And this is where artificial intelligence comes in.

As a data generator this really fits very well with what we’ve been doing, but in a very new way of being able to utilize that data. And this will also really benefit our users, and we will be able to bring in new users, those that perhaps need some of the new AI tools in order to be able to better ask their questions and be better able to do their analyses. I think this opens up a huge new space for JGI, and I think makes us even more impactful in the future. 

Papp: To learn more about the Joint Genome Institute, a national user facility at Berkeley Lab, visit jgi.doe.gov. This is Ashleigh Papp from the Strategic Communications team at Berkeley Lab, thanks for listening!