Brian Hedlund (Life Sciences) was part of a large international team led by the U.S. Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute (JGI) that published a paper, "A Genomic Catalog of Earth's Microbiomes," in Nature Biotechnology. The paper describes 52,515 new draft microbial genomes that were generated from metagenomic data contained within the JGI's Integrated Microbial Genomes & Microbiomes platform. The study revealed 18,000 new microbial species and expanded the known diversity of bacteria and archaea by 44 percent.
