Word: geneses
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Additionally, scientists are getting a much better understanding of what individual genes do, no matter where they're from. The challenge, explains Venter, is to identify the genes that allow some microbes to change sunlight into sugars, others to absorb carbon dioxide from the air and still others to transform...
So researchers have set out to look for those genes--and not just in the ocean. Venter is also sampling the air over New York City, and other scientists are looking into hot springs, digging into the ground and even testing toxic-waste sites. "You can pick up a gram...
It's not easy to culture wild microbes in the lab, but much can be learned by sequencing the genes contained in a sample of earth, air or water. Just this past April, scientists from the Joint Genome Institute (JGI), a Department of Energy lab in Walnut Creek, Calif., announced...
In the Sargasso Sea, meanwhile, Venter was shocked to find nearly 800 genes for making light-sensitive proteins like those found in the human retina--quadrupling the number of photoreceptors known to science. "This suggests," Venter wrote in New Scientist last May, "that some new type of light-driven biology...
Or take ethanol, the gasoline substitute manufactured today mostly from corn. It currently takes a lot of harsh chemicals to process ethanol, but microbes could do the same thing. "I think it's doable within this decade," says Patrinos, "that we will develop a superbug that can make that conversion...