Just a quick post here that our paper just came out, “Draft Genome Sequences of Bacillus glennii V44-8, Bacillus saganii V47-23a, Bacillus sp. Strain V59.32b, Bacillus sp. Strain MER_TA_151, and Paenibacillus sp. Strain MER_111, Isolated from Cleanrooms Where the Viking and Mars Exploration Rover Spacecraft Were Assembled“. This describes the genomes of a couple new species described at JPL and a few other spacecraft-associated isolates. The annotation and assembly were undertaken at a workshop, hosted by JPL, in February… all the undergraduates involved are authors on this paper which is pretty awesome. I blogged previously about the workshop here.
What a great innovation from the undergraduates. They could create more advanced like this and contribute to our science when they finished their studies.