Word: venter
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Indeed, half a decade after Venter and his archrival, Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, stood together at the White House to announce that the human genome had been sequenced, biologists have come to re-evaluate just what that milestone really meant. Back then, it was widely assumed that the emerging science of human genomics would quickly lead to spectacular cures for cancer and other diseases and even allow couples to have "designer" babies with desirable traits plucked from a catalog...
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 dead plant matter into clean-burning hydrogen...
...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 of soil," says Aristides Patrinos, who oversees the Department of Energy's genome program, "and there's DNA in it. By sequencing that DNA, you can infer what's there in terms of diversity." As a rule, the more diverse a given ecosystem--the more genes present, even at the microbial...
...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 may explain the Sargasso Sea's unexpectedly high diversity of species...
Hundreds more equally promising samples are being fed into the sequencers at JGI, at the J. Craig Venter Institute Joint Technology Center in Rockville, Md., and at other labs around the world. Venter's take from the Sargasso Sea was impressive enough on its own, but he is taking a new ocean sample every 200 miles or so as he circumnavigates the globe. Some 85% of the gene sequences he hauls up are unique to that site, suggesting that each 200-mile stretch of ocean represents a vastly different ecosystem. And that's just from scratching the surface, says...