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NLM Selects Dr. Richard H. Scheuermann as Scientific Director for the National Library of Medicine
Patricia Flatley Brennan, RN, PhD, Director of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has named Richard H. Scheuermann, PhD, as NLM’s new Scientific Director following a nationwide search. Dr. Scheuermann is currently the La Jolla campus director at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI). He is expected to begin his role as NLM Scientific Director on September 10, 2023. “NLM is embarking on a bold new direction to optimize NLM’s vibrant...
New Sequencing Technologies Enable Better and Faster Understanding of the Human Microbiome
Humans have trillions of different species of microorganisms living inside and on the human body. These microbes colonize on the skin, gut, oral cavity, vagina, internal organs, and circulating fluids, and are called the human microbiome. The human microbiome plays profound roles in health and disease. Since the first human microbiome study reported by the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) in 2006, researchers have gained unprecedented knowledge on how the microbiome influences human...
Sequencing and analysis of globally obtained human respiratory syncytial virus A and B genomes.
Human respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) is the leading cause of respiratory tract infections in children globally, with nearly all children experiencing at least one infection by the age of two. Partial sequencing of the attachment glycoprotein gene is conducted routinely for genotyping, but relatively few whole genome sequences are available for RSV. The goal of our study was to sequence the genomes of RSV strains collected from multiple countries to further understand the global diversity...
About Lucy Stewart
Lucy Stewart, MBA, serves as the director of project and operational management at J. Craig Venter Institute, boasting nearly two decades of unwavering dedication to pioneering research project management. Her career is characterized by a diverse and impactful portfolio of projects that are centered on intricate, longitudinal, infectious disease and bioinformatics projects, solidifying her as a distinguished professional in the field. Beyond her role in project oversight, Ms.
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...
The JCVI Genomic Frontier Fund
As we complete our 26th year as a private genomic research institution, we are still just as excited as we were in the very beginning to be making new discoveries, potentially ones that will change our society for the better. The knowledge gained from our study of DNA, or as Dr. Venter likes to call it, “the software of life”, has exponentially accelerated the progress of science and medicine. However, we are still just scratching the surface of understanding life and many more...
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...
LJI Scientists Identify Potential Targets for Immune Responses to Novel Coronavirus
LA JOLLA, CA—Within two months, SARS-CoV-2, a previously unknown coronavirus, has raced around globe, infecting over a 100,000 people with numbers continuing to rise quickly. Effective countermeasures require helpful tools to monitor viral spread and understand how the immune system responds to the virus. Publishing in the March 16, 2020, online issue of Host, Cell and Microbe, a team of researchers at La Jolla Institute for Immunology, in collaboration with researchers at the J....
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...