Trapping Microbes 750 miles north of the Arctic Circle

About 1% of all microbes are “culturable” in the lab. They are some of the most stubborn organisms requiring special and specific nutrients as well as optimal temperatures and conditions. So, how do we get the “unculturables” to be “culturable”? We make bacteria “traps”,...

Thule, Greenland Year Two

Sequence data from the previous year allowed us to determine the overall microbial population in each site and this year we decided to focus on the Rich Lake site which seem to have representation of nearly all microbes found in the other sites. So lucky for us we only had to work on one...

Scientist Spotlight: Meet Sarah Highlander

Sarah Highlander PhD is an esteemed scientist and professor who joined JCVI in La Jolla this year. She comes from a long line of academically successful Professors, including a great uncle who was a University Dean. As a young child, Sarah was influenced by her parents: her mother was...

Professional Development Opportunities this Summer

This summer we are offering two professional development workshops: GenomeSolver and Bioinformatics: Unlocking Life through Computation.  Both explore bioinformatics, microbial diversity and the implementation in the undergradauate or high school classrooms.  The GenomeSolver...

JCVI Hosts South African Scientists to Share Microbiome Research Techniques

Two scientists from the University of Cape Town, South Africa have joined Dr. Bill Nierman’s lab for the next month as part of NIH’s Human Heredity and Health in Africa (H3Africa) Initiative, a training program designed to build out technical biological skills in the African research...

Building the World's First Net-Zero Energy Lab [video]

Building the World's First Net-Zero Energy Lab And see the construction in time-lapes.

Amazon Expedition

Yesterday, JCVI expedition scientist Jeff Hoffman embarked from Manaus on a sampling expedition of the Amazon River and its tributaries, which contains 1/5th of the Earth’s river flow. In collaboration with scientists Dr. Guilherme Oliviera and Dr. Sara Cuadros from the Centro de Excelencia...

The 2014 Summer Internship Application is Open and Announcing the Genomics Scholar Program

The 2014 Summer Internship Application is now open.   Last summer, we hosted 49 interns from a pool of 424 applicants. They presented their research in the First Annual Summer Internship Poster Sessions held in San Diego and Rockville. The posters were judged by a team of...

Sampling: US to the Azores

I’m off again on an ocean sampling voyage but this time instead of being onboard the JCVI’s Sorcerer II, I am onboard the R/V Endeavor as part of a multi-institution, international scientific sampling team that is headed from the US to the Azores. On Thursday August 22 we left Morehead...

Hair claimed to belong to Leonardo da Vinci to undergo DNA testing

Critics, however, argue that this effort is flawed from the beginning

Students learn about genomics, a life in science, at J. Craig Venter Institute