GA4GH: International policies and standards for data sharing across genomic research and healthcare.

The Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) aims to accelerate biomedical advances by enabling the responsible sharing of clinical and genomic data through both harmonized data aggregation and federated approaches. The decreasing cost of genomic sequencing (along with other genome-wide molecular assays) and increasing evidence of its clinical utility will soon drive the generation of sequence data from tens of millions of humans, with increasing levels of diversity. In this perspective, we present the GA4GH strategies for addressing the major challenges of this data revolution.

Capturing and cultivating single bacterial cells in gel microdroplets to obtain near-complete genomes.

Assembling a complete genome from a single bacterial cell, termed single-cell genomics, is challenging with current technologies. Recovery rates of complete genomes from fragmented assemblies of single-cell templates significantly vary. Although increasing the amount of genomic template material by standard cultivation improves recovery, most bacteria are unfortunately not amenable to traditional cultivation, possibly owing to the lack of unidentified, yet necessary, growth signals and/or specific symbiotic influences.

Nearly finished genomes produced using gel microdroplet culturing reveal substantial intraspecies genomic diversity within the human microbiome.

The majority of microbial genomic diversity remains unexplored. This is largely due to our inability to culture most microorganisms in isolation, which is a prerequisite for traditional genome sequencing. Single-cell sequencing has allowed researchers to circumvent this limitation.

Artificial polyploidy improves bacterial single cell genome recovery.

Background: Single cell genomics (SCG) is a combination of methods whose goal is to decipher the complete genomic sequence from a single cell and has been applied mostly to organisms with smaller genomes, such as bacteria and archaea. Prior single cell studies showed that a significant portion of a genome could be obtained. However, breakages of genomic DNA and amplification bias have made it very challenging to acquire a complete genome with single cells.

The importance of soil microorganisms for maintaining diverse plant communities in tallgrass prairie.

Premise Of The Study: According to the "Janzen-Connell hypothesis," soil microorganisms have the potential to increase plant community diversity by mediating negative feedback on plant growth. Evidence for such microbe-driven negative feedback has been found in a variety of terrestrial systems. However, it is currently unknown how general this phenomenon is within most plant communities.

Scale-dependent niche axes of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi.

Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) are mutualistic with most species of plants and are known to influence plant community diversity and composition. To better understand natural plant communities and the ecological processes they control it is important to understand what determines the distribution and diversity of AMF. We tested three putative niche axes: plant species composition, disturbance history, and soil chemistry against AMF species composition to determine which axis correlated most strongly with a changing AMF community.