Workshop: Mining Microbial Dark Matters

Dr. Janet Jansson will be in attendance at the Mining Microbial Dark Matters Workshop

Thursday - Friday 16-17 July 2015

The Fairmont Resort, Leura

Metagenomics/ meta-transcriptomic sequencing has provided continuously increasing proportion of conserved DNA sequences with no defined functions. There is significant evidence that many uncharacterized protein domain sequences are variants of functionally described domains. It is possible that these proteins provide key functions for ecological fitness and niche adaptation.

This workshop will explore what the key approaches are and whether they can be utilised to assign functions to microbial dark matters- including single cell genome, experimental, ecological and bioinformatics approaches.

About Dr. Janet Jansson

Janet Jansson is the Division Director of Biological Sciences at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL).

She obtained her Ph.D. in 1988 at Michigan State University and then established a successful research career in Sweden over the next 20 years. From 2000-2006 she was the Professor and Chair of Environmental Microbiology at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and Vice Dean of the Natural Sciences Faculty where she coordinated the Swedish strategic national center of excellence, "The Uppsala Microbiomics Center". From 2007-2013 she was a senior staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and from 2012-2014 an Adjunct Professor at UC Berkeley and the University of Copenhagen.

She was recruited to PNNL in June 2014 and she currently also serves as the President of the International Society for Microbiology (ISME)  and as a senior editor of the ISME Journal. Janet Jansson has more than 30 years experience in microbial ecology, with specific expertise in the use of molecular approaches (omics) to study complex microbial communities, such as those residing in soil, sediments and the human gut.

She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology, has more than 110 publications and is the editor of 2 books on molecular microbial ecology and 1 textbook on soil microbiology.