Search
Ocean Microplastics Explained
As we wrap up sampling in the waters off of Maine, Dr. Chris Dupont discusses how collections of plastic particles in the water – or “plastisphere” – may be harboring fish or human pathogens. There may also be microbes responsible for degrading plastic, which are being investigated. Dr. Dupont's work on microplastics is a continuation of J. Craig Venter Institute's Global Ocean Sampling (GOS) program.
Developing Genetic Tools to Manipulate African Swine Fever Virus and Generate Attenuated Strains
African swine fever (ASF) is a devastating hemorrhagic disease of pigs with mortality rates up to 100% in infected pig herds. It is prevalent in many sub-Saharan African countries, causing major economic losses and threatening food security. Due to this sustained occurrence and the ever-increasing global traffic of people and goods, ASF poses an added global threat. ASF is caused by a large DNA virus, African swine fever virus (ASFV), and there is currently no vaccine against it....
Caenorhabditis elegans expressed sequence tags identify gene families and potential disease gene homologues.
A database containing mapped partial cDNA sequences from Caenorhabditis elegans will provide a ready starting point for identifying nematode homologues of important human genes and determining their functions in C. elegans. A total of 720 expressed sequence tags (ESTs) have been generated from 585 clones randomly selected from a mixed-stage C. elegans cDNA library. Comparison of these ESTs with sequence databases identified 422 new C. elegans genes, of which 317 are not similar to any...
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....
About Marcelo Freire
Marcelo Freire is an associate professor in the Genomic Medicine and Infectious Disease Department at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI). Prior to joining JCVI, Dr. Freire was an assistant faculty member at The Forsyth Institute and Harvard University (Division of Oral Medicine, Infection and Immunity). Early in his career, he worked on tissue biology of infectious diseases, biofilm-induced bone diseases and antibody engineering. As a dual-scientist and clinician, Dr.
Carl Woese 1928-2012
Editor's Note: This post originally appeared on T. Taxus, December 31, 2012, by Jonathan Badger. Dr. Badger is an Assistant Professor in the Microbial and Environmental Genomics Group at the J. Craig Venter Institute in La Jolla, CA. Reprinted by permission. As you may have heard, Carl Woese died of pancreatic cancer yesterday at the age of 84. I had the honor of working with Carl in grad school at the University of Illinois where my advisor, Gary Olsen, ran a joint lab...
Stalking the fourth domain in metagenomic data: searching for, discovering, and interpreting novel, deep branches in marker gene phylogenetic trees.
Most of our knowledge about the ancient evolutionary history of organisms has been derived from data associated with specific known organisms (i.e., organisms that we can study directly such as plants, metazoans, and culturable microbes). Recently, however, a new source of data for such studies has arrived: DNA sequence data generated directly from environmental samples. Such metagenomic data has enormous potential in a variety of areas including, as we argue here, in studies of very early...
Towards a comprehensive structural variation map of an individual human genome.
Several genomes have now been sequenced, with millions of genetic variants annotated. While significant progress has been made in mapping single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and small (