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Launching the Global Community Cyberinfrastructure for Advanced Marine Microbial Research and Analysis (CAMERA)
Scientists and engineers at the University of California, San Diego and the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) have flipped the virtual switch on the first cyberinfrastructure customized to serve the marine microbial metagenomics community. At the heart of the cyberinfrastructure is a new, high-performance computer and storage complex funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and located in UC San Diego's Atkinson Hall, headquarters of the California Institute for Telecommunications and...
Candidate phylum TM6 genome recovered from a hospital sink biofilm provides genomic insights into this uncultivated phylum.
The "dark matter of life" describes microbes and even entire divisions of bacterial phyla that have evaded cultivation and have yet to be sequenced. We present a genome from the globally distributed but elusive candidate phylum TM6 and uncover its metabolic potential. TM6 was detected in a biofilm from a sink drain within a hospital restroom by analyzing cells using a highly automated single-cell genomics platform. We developed an approach for increasing throughput and effectively improving...
The diploid genome sequence of an individual human.
Presented here is a genome sequence of an individual human. It was produced from approximately 32 million random DNA fragments, sequenced by Sanger dideoxy technology and assembled into 4,528 scaffolds, comprising 2,810 million bases (Mb) of contiguous sequence with approximately 7.5-fold coverage for any given region. We developed a modified version of the Celera assembler to facilitate the identification and comparison of alternate alleles within this individual diploid genome. Comparison...
Revolutionizing plastic waste management through biological upcycling
La Jolla, California—January 31, 2025—It is commonly understood that plastic waste is a tremendous problem. But how big of a problem? According to the U.N. Environment Programme, the world currently produces around 400 million metric tons of plastic waste per year—a number that is so far beyond human scale it is difficult to grasp. In terms of weight, yearly plastic waste is equivalent to about 73 million elephants or 40,000 Eiffel Towers. A significant portion of this waste is...
The Sorcerer II Global Ocean Sampling Expedition: metagenomic characterization of viruses within aquatic microbial samples.
Viruses are the most abundant biological entities on our planet. Interactions between viruses and their hosts impact several important biological processes in the world's oceans such as horizontal gene transfer, microbial diversity and biogeochemical cycling. Interrogation of microbial metagenomic sequence data collected as part of the Sorcerer II Global Ocean Expedition (GOS) revealed a high abundance of viral sequences, representing approximately 3% of the total predicted proteins....
McMurdo Sound
It took another day for the storm to blow itself out, but by Tuesday the wind and driving snow had abated, and we drove our Pisten Bully back out to our temporary shelter near Cape Evans. It took several hours of digging to clear the snow away from our vehicles, but once we started driving away from the hut we quickly ran into another problem: the snow was so Jeff McQuaid using a Kovacs drill to obtain an ice core deep that our sleds and vehicles would bog down in the snowdrifts....
Al Gore to lead global ‘healthy planet, healthy lives’ forum in Switzerland
Switzerland will host some of the world’s top scientists, policymakers, and industry leaders at a major international science event in Montreux this May. The fifth annual Frontiers Forum will welcome speakers including the former US vice president, Nobel Prize awardee and the leading advocate about climate change, Al Gore, renowned cognitive psychologist and best-selling author, Steven Pinker, and Mariya Gabriel, European Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and...
Key Biological Mechanism is Disrupted by Ocean Acidification
A team led by scientists from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego and the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) has demonstrated that the excess carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere through the combustion of fossil fuels interferes with the health of phytoplankton which form the base of marine food webs. Phytoplankton are microscopic plants whose growth in ocean surface waters supports ocean food webs and global marine fisheries. They are also key...
A comparison of whole-genome shotgun-derived mouse chromosome 16 and the human genome.
The high degree of similarity between the mouse and human genomes is demonstrated through analysis of the sequence of mouse chromosome 16 (Mmu 16), which was obtained as part of a whole-genome shotgun assembly of the mouse genome. The mouse genome is about 10% smaller than the human genome, owing to a lower repetitive DNA content. Comparison of the structure and protein-coding potential of Mmu 16 with that of the homologous segments of the human genome identifies regions of conserved...
Karen Nelson, Ph.D., Named President, Robert Friedman, Ph.D., Appointed as Chief Operating Officer of J. Craig Venter Institute
SAN DIEGO, CA and ROCKVILLE, MD —October 3, 2012 —The J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) today announced new management changes, naming Karen Nelson, Ph.D., as President and Robert Friedman, Ph.D., as Chief Operating Officer. Both will report directly to J. Craig Venter, Ph.D., who will continue to lead the organization as Founder, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of the Board of Trustees. Nelson, who has been with the Institute since 1996, was previously the...