General

GeneFigure - A tool developed by Samir Akre to create more intuitive figures

Samir, Akre, a 3rd year Biomedical Engineering undergraduate in the Mills lab, developed GeneFigure to ease the process of making high-quality figures for genome-related papers.

Genbank files can be directly uploaded to the site to generate a figure immediately in vector form so it does not lose quality as it's stretched. Many parameters from the name of the gene and specific shade of its color of its block can be changed to get consistent desired results. The idea is to speed up what used to be a painfully slow manual process.

Dr. Mills Elected Fellow in American Academy of Microbiology

Congrats to Dr. Mills for being elected a Fellow in the American Academy of Microbiology.  The Academy recognizes excellence, originality, and leadership in the microbiological sciences, and election to this group is a mark of distinction. Academy Fellows are eminent leaders in the field of microbiology and are relied upon for authoritative advice and insight on critical issues in microbiology.

Dr. Mills NIH talk online

Dr. Mills recent talk at the July NIH meeting entitled "Human Microbiome Science: Vision for the Future" is available for viewing here.

Lactobacillus buchneri genome paper - Journal Bacteriology cover pic

The recent publication of the genome sequence in Journal of Bacteriology has garnered the cover image for the journal.  The picture is of a biorefinery in Illinois from where the strain was isolated. This work is a collaboration between researchers at USDA ARS in Peoria IL and Dr. Mills.