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.
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. Steve Frese was recently honored by the European Probiotics Association with the Jules Tournut Probiotics Prize for his PhD work with Jens Walters (then) at the University of Nebraska. Congrats to Steve!!
Dr. Mills has joined a host of collaborators on the American Gut Project. This open source project, initiated by Rob Knight and Jeff Leach seeks to characterize the microbial diversity in the American public. A very cool way to find out the identify of your own bacteria symbionts!
Dr. Mills and Greg Allen (Winemaker Dolce Winery) were interviewed on the Ion Torrent Bus discussing how Next Generation Sequencing tools can be used to profile the microbial ecology of wine fermentations.
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.
