Tag Archives: hoi-ying Holman

What’s on Your Skin? Archaea, That’s What

Berkeley Lab study on human skin microbiome finds archaea abundance associated with age

It turns out your skin is crawling with single-celled microorganisms – ­and they’re not just bacteria. A study by the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the Medical University of Graz has found that the skin microbiome also contains archaea, a type of extreme-loving microbe, and that the amount of it varies with age. (more…)

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Synchrotron Infrared Unveils a Mysterious Microbial Community

Berkeley Lab scientists join an international collaboration to understand how archaea and bacteria work together deep in a cold sulfur spring

In the fall of 2010, Hoi-Ying Holman of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) was approached by an international team researching a mysterious microbial community discovered deep in cold sulfur springs in southern Germany.

“They told me what they were doing and said, ‘We know what you contributed to the oil-spill research,’” recalls Holman, who heads the Chemical Ecology group in Berkeley Lab’s Earth Sciences Division. “They wondered if I could help them determine the biochemistry of their microbe samples.” (more…)

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Study Shows Deepwater Oil Plume in Gulf Degraded by Microbes

In the aftermath of the explosion of BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico, a dispersed oil plume  was formed at a depth between 3,600 and 4,000 feet and extending some 10 miles out from the wellhead. An intensive study by scientists with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) found that microbial activity, spearheaded by a new and unclassified species, degrades oil much faster than anticipated. This degradation appears to take place without a significant level of oxygen depletion.

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