When I was a graduate student I was looking around for an extremophile – especially an evolutionarily novel one. And I settled on this species Haloferax volcanii – a model halophilic archaeon largely because Ford Doolittle and colleagues had started to turn it into a genetic model organism (and because Patrick Keeling, from Ford’s lab convinced me it was a good thing to do). So I started work on this species – doing DNA repair studies in the lab. See my PhD thesis for some of the work I did which I never published outside of the thesis for multiple reasons. But I continued to be interested in this species. And when I was working at TIGR, an NSF Program Officer approached me asking me to help get the genome sequencing done for this species. So, well, I did: The Complete Genome Sequence of Haloferax volcanii DS2, a Model Archaeon. And I became interested in other haloarchaea and eventually started working with Marc Facciotti, in the lab next to mine, in sequencing from across the diversity of the haloarchaea: Sequencing of Seven Haloarchaeal Genomes Reveals Patterns of Genomic Flux and Phylogenetically Driven Sequencing of Extremely Halophilic Archaea Reveals Strategies for Static and Dynamic Osmo-response.
Anyway – enough about me. The whole point here is to point people to a new paper: BMC Biology | Abstract | Generation of comprehensive transposon insertion mutant library for the model archaeon, Haloferax volcanii , and its use for gene discovery. Further evidence for the use of Haloferax volcanii as a model species. Tools continue to become available for genetic and experimental studies in this species. So – if you are looking for an unusual and interesting organisms to work on – consider working on this species …
Jonathan Eisen's Lab 