Scientist Spotlight: Meet David Wentworth

During the height of the H1N1 Flu pandemic, David Wentworth was running a microbial genetics laboratory at the Wadsworth Center, New York State Department of Health (NYSDOH) where he was instrumental in developing a method to amplify influenza genomes regardless of strain using “universal...

2012 JCVI Internship Program Is Now Accepting New Applications

Wow! Another year has gone by.  Its hard to think it is November - almost December with the warm weather we have been enjoying.  However it did not start that way. The 2012 JCVI Internship Program is open to accept spring and summer applications. The application process...

JCVI La Jolla Breaks Ground

It is official! On Tuesday, September 20th JCVI officially broke ground on a new La Jolla, California sustainable lab, to be located directly on the campus of the University of California, San Diego. Craig Venter, JCVI Founder and President along with UCSD Chancellor Marye Anne Fox; Vice...

Evaluating Strain-level Variation of Key Acidogenic Species in Dental Plaque Biofilms

The characterization of the dental plaque microbiome, using traditional 16S rDNA profiling strategies, illustrates both the strengths and the limitations of this method. The central limitation of the 16S rDNA methodology is the inability to decipher strain-level variation within a...

Cataloguing the Gene Expression Patterns of Dental Plaque Biofilms: A Reference Dental Plaque Transcriptome

The RNA-Seq method has been widely adopted as an alternative to the use of DNA microarrays. In most contexts, the RNA-Seq method is implemented when a single reference organism is being studied. Our project endeavored to establish working methods to enable the generation of cDNA libraries that...

Surrogate Methods for Profiling Species of the Oral and Gut Microbiome

We engaged in an effort focused on alleviating a substantial barrier facing the human microbiome research community. While powerful, the 16S rDNA gene is insufficiently divergent to allow discrimination of many species and essentially no strains present within communities. The increasing costs...

The Mobile Lab Is Going to Sunny San Diego

Late one evening in January 2006, the mobile lab pulled into the parking lot at 9704 Medical Center Drive. It was such an exciting evening! Within a few days, we had all the lab supplies on it and began visiting students. The first school in the Washington Area was Patapsco Middle School in...

The Hill School: Day 2

The day started early Tuesday with first period.  Thirty eager students arrived on the bus to determine the results of the amplification of the DNA they extracted the day before.  The PCR ran overnight, copying part of a conserved gene in plants, RuBisCo, that can be used to...

The Hill School: Day 1

The day started early with reagent and lab preparation before we even left for school OR had coffee. We expected to do over 100 DNA Extractions as the first step in the DNA Barcoding. We arrived on campus as the first period was starting –we didn’t have class until after 9:00....

Scientists in La Jolla Make Progress Understanding New Coronavirus Strain

Gene Drives: New and Improved

As the science advances, policy-makers and regulators need to develop responses that reflect the latest developments and the diversity of approaches and applications.

Pink shoes and a lab jacket: Finding your way as a female scientist

Women in science tell high school girls they, too, can change the world

PEOPLE IN YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD: Jazz piano in La Jolla scientist Clyde Hutchison’s DNA

How AI can help us decode immunity

Artificial intelligence and machine learning will be the keys to unraveling how the human immune system prevents and controls disease

Construction of an Escherichia coli genome with fewer codons sets records

The biggest synthetic genome so far has been made, with a smaller set of amino-acid-encoding codons than usual — raising the prospect of encoding proteins that contain unnatural amino-acid residues.

Public Health is the Next Big Thing at UC San Diego

Researchers have swapped the genome of gut germ E. coli for an artificial one

By creating a new genome, scientists could create organisms tailored to produce desirable compounds