The New Lineages of Life (NeLLi) Group at the DOE Joint Genome Institute studies understudied microbes and viruses in environmental and host-associated systems. We combine sequencing, cultivation, and AI/ML to characterize genome diversity, microbial interactions, and applications in biosurveillance.
We study giant viruses recovered from environmental sequence data and laboratory systems to characterize their diversity, genome content, and evolutionary relationships.
We investigate symbiotic associations to understand partner specificity, genome evolution, and metabolic exchange.
We use metagenomics and single-cell genomics to recover genomes from uncultivated lineages and place them in phylogenetic context.
We develop laboratory and computational workflows for rapid identification of pathogens and other agents of concern in environmental and clinical samples.
We study microorganisms from extreme environments to identify the cellular and genomic features associated with survival under heat, salinity, pressure, and other stressors.
We develop computational methods that use machine learning to support classification, annotation, and comparative analysis of biological sequence data.