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2019 Summer Internship Program
The 2019 Summer Internship Program which wrapped up in August was another rousing success at the J. Craig Venter Institute. Faculty and staff in both the Rockville (MD) and La Jolla (CA) campuses mentored and trained 25 students (high school, undergraduate, and graduate students) from across the country in cutting-edge technologies related to the biomedical field. High school students participated in the internship for 8-weeks and undergraduate and graduate students took...
Assessing diversity and biogeography of aerobic anoxygenic phototrophic bacteria in surface waters of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans using the Global Ocean Sampling expedition metagenomes.
Aerobic anoxygenic photosynthetic bacteria (AAnP) were recently proposed to be significant contributors to global oceanic carbon and energy cycles. However, AAnP abundance, spatial distribution, diversity and potential ecological importance remain poorly understood. Here we present metagenomic data from the Global Ocean Sampling expedition indicating that AAnP diversity and abundance vary in different oceanic regions. Furthermore, we show for the first time that the composition of AAnP...
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 Chancellor for Health Sciences and Dean of the School of Medicine, David Brenner; Director of Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Vice Chancellor for Marine Sciences, Tony Haymet; and San Diego Mayor...
Generating a Library of Influenza a Virus Hemagglutanin and Neuraminidase Genes
Titas Bera, Anthony Bennici, Haley Hochstein, Karla M. Stucker, Suman R. Das, David E. Wentworth Virology Group, J. Craig Venter Institute, Rockville, MD 20850 Every year, five to twenty percent of the United States population is infected with seasonal influenza, making the construction of a seasonal vaccine of high importance. However, due to antigenic drift among seasonal influenza viruses, the vaccine strains need frequent updating. Antigenic drift occurs as the genes...
The Protein Naming Utility: a rules database for protein nomenclature.
Generation of syntactically correct and unambiguous names for proteins is a challenging, yet vital task for functional annotation processes. Proteins are often named based on homology to known proteins, many of which have problematic names. To address the need to generate high-quality protein names, and capture our significant experience correcting protein names manually, we have developed the Protein Naming Utility (PNU, http://www.jcvi.org/pn-utility). The PNU is a web-based database for...
Potential Breakthroughs in Treating Oral Disease Through Better Understanding of the Oral Microbiome
Most people think of bacteria as the enemy, but scientists at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) are exploring ways to harness bacteria and phages (the viruses that infect bacteria) as a new way to fight infection. JCVI scientist, Anna Edlund, PhD, is leading one of our efforts to understand the human oral microbiome and learn what role bacteria play in both oral health and disease. Inflammatory gum disease (gingivitis/periodontal disease) and tooth decay are not only the two...
CharProtDB: a database of experimentally characterized protein annotations.
CharProtDB (http://www.jcvi.org/charprotdb/) is a curated database of biochemically characterized proteins. It provides a source of direct rather than transitive assignments of function, designed to support automated annotation pipelines. The initial data set in CharProtDB was collected through manual literature curation over the years by analysts at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) [formerly The Institute of Genomic Research (TIGR)] as part of their prokaryotic genome sequencing...
About Harinder Singh
Harinder Singh, PhD is a Staff Scientist in the Infectious Disease Department at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI). Dr. Singh's area of research is mostly focused on various data analysis, data mining, development of prediction algorithm and databases and bioinformatics pipelines for the scientific community. Dr. Singh has significant experience in analyzing proteomics, metabolomics, expression, microbiome and metagenomics datasets using various bioinformatics pipelines. Dr.
Every Day is World Food Day at JCVI
World Food Day is a global initiative of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations to ensure that people have access to enough high-quality food to lead active and healthy lives. After a period of decline, world hunger is on the rise again. Today, over 820 million people are suffering chronic undernourishment, according to the latest FAO 2018 State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report. At JCVI we have several programs aimed at tackling world hunger....