Who We Are

The U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (DOE JGI) was created in 1997 to unite the expertise and resources in DNA sequencing, informatics, and technology development pioneered at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) genome centers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), and Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). In 1999, to accelerate the completion of DOE’s commitment to the Human Genome Project, the University of California, which manages the DOE JGI lead laboratory in LBNL, leased laboratory and office space in a light industrial park in Walnut Creek, California, to consolidate activities in what is known now as the Production Genomics Facility (PGF). The significant economies of scale achieved in doing so enabled the JGI to be the first to publish the sequence analysis of the target chromosomes 5, 16, and 19, in the journal Nature.  Following this accomplishment, the DOE JGI went on to advance basic science by sequencing scores of microbial species as well as several model organisms and contributing this information freely to the public databases.

In 2004, the DOE JGI established itself as a national user facility—where it continues to receive the bulk of its support from the Office of Biological and Environmental Research in DOE's Office of Science. The vast majority of JGI sequencing is conducted under the auspices of the Community Sequencing Program (CSP), surveying the biosphere to characterize organisms relevant to the DOE science mission areas of bioenergy, global carbon cycling, and biogeochemistry. The DOE JGI’s largest customers are the DOE Bioenergy Research Centers (BRCs), which were launched in 2007 to accelerate basic research in the development of next generation cellulosic biofuels.

Today, the DOE JGI Production Genomics Facility has grown to occupy 80,000 square feet and employ 250 staff led by internationally recognized geneticist, Eddy Rubin, M.D., Ph.D.

A recently revised Memorandum of Understanding governs the operations of the DOE JGI and was endorsed by the Directors of the partner laboratories, LBNL, LLNL, LANL, as well as Oak Ridge (ORNL) and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), and the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology (formerly associated with the Stanford Human Genome Center).  The PGF workforce draws most heavily from LBNL and LLNL.

The DOE JGI is enormously productive, not only in terms of generation of DNA sequence data (in October 2008 alone, over 20 billion nucleotides, or the equivalent of over six human genomes) but also with respect to generating high-profile publications.  Over the last three years, DOE JGI has played a role and shared co-authorship in a total of 234 peer-reviewed publications. In addition, the DOE JGI played a significant role in 48 papers in the journals Science and the Nature between 2006 and the present. All of these papers have one or more DOE JGI authors and for the majority of them the DOE JGI played a leadership role in the study, reflected in first or senior authorship.