What’s Hot in Biology 2011? Why, the Genomic Encyclopedia paper I am senior author on #Yay?

And now back to some science. Got an email a few days ago from Nikos Kyrpides pointing to this: What’s Hot in Biology – 2011. Very cool – the paper on the “Genomic Encyclopedia of Bacteria and Archaea” project that I coordinated (and for which I am the senior author) has been identified as the hot biology paper of November/December 2011 by “Science Watch”. Plus they have a reasonably detailed story about it “BRANCHING OUT WITH PHYLOGENETICALLY DRIVEN GENOME SEQUENCING” by Jeremy Cherfas. I note – the project was done at the DOE-Joint genome Institute and involved an enormous number of people there (I have an Adjunct Appointment there). It was done in collaboration with the DSMZ – a microbial culture collection in Germany.

The paper A phylogeny driven genomic encyclopedia of bacteria and archaea apparently has been getting a lot of citations, which I guess is how it got picked as being “hot”.

If you want to know more about this project and paper see the following links:

• Story Behind the Nature Paper on ‘A phylogeny driven genomic encyclopedia of bacteria & archaea’ #genomics #evolution
• More coverage of the GEBA “Phylogeny Driven Genomic Encyclopedia” 
• Scientists Start a Genomic Catalog of Earth’s Abundant Microbes (article by Carl Zimmer in the New York Times)
• Presenting a genomic encyclopedia of bacteria (and archaea) (article by John Timmer)

Some videos of talks or interviews about the project