Lake Mendota sits right next to the University of Wisconsin, Madison. And Trina McMahon's lab has been sampling the microbes of that lake for over 20 years, to understand how the freshwater ecosystem works. So a few years ago, when they set out to analyze 500 metagenomes, it was the biggest project the JGI had ever put together. The next 3 episodes are the story behind that giant assembly from Lake Mendota. In this episode: the software evolution that made metagenome assemblies like this possible.Links from this episode:Submit your own proposal to work with the JGIEpisode TranscriptThe JGI’s Metagenome ProgramMetaHipMerThe ExaBiome ProjectPaper: Hofmeyr, S., Egan, R., Georganas, E. et al. Terabase-scale metagenome coassembly with MetaHipMer. Sci Rep 10, 10689 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-67416-5 Our contact info:Twitter: @JGIEmail: jgi-comms at lbl dot gov