Innovators and Innovations J. Craig Venter Metagenomics, that was the topic being discussed on that glorious Indian summer as 400 research leaders gathered at a beachside resort in Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, for the annual conference organized by genomics innovator J. Craig Venter. Venter has directed the heady mix of frolic and big-budget biology for the past 17 years, but this time he brought something different to the table. Venter’s interest in metagenomics was the reason he showed up. Venter is best known as the “brash scientific rebel” who, as head of Celera Genomics, had seemed poised to beat the government to a draft sequence of the human genome. He successfully adapted the technique of whole-genome shotgun sequencing for this, shotgun sequencing breaks up an organism's DNA into myriad short fragments that can each be quickly analyzed, then virtually reassembles the whole genome in a computer. He has turned his attention to applications of genomics that ultimately yield solutions to global climate change. |
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Dr. Pablo Zamora Dr. Pablo Zamora is a researcher in the Plant Sciences Department, Public Intellectual Property Resource for Agriculture, or PIPRA at UC Davis. Dr. Pablo Zamora has traveled the world to recover environmental samples from strange and exotic environments, and has taken these samples back to the labs at UC Davis to discovery the microbial diversity in them with the aid of the new metagenomics techniques. He achieves this with his genomic libraries, containing large fragments of environmental DNA. The clones in these libraries contain important data. Relatively high molecular weight DNA needs to be extracted and used to construct clone libraries. These libraries are extremely important to the researchers at PIPRA, given the high cost of sequencing whole metagenomes.
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Venter established several institutes that have now merged into one, the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland. The Venter Institute's effort includes a high-profile, round-the-world ocean sampling expedition in the 95-foot sloop Sorcerer II. Workers on the vessel have spent the past 18 months sampling and filtering seawater from a few feet down near coastlines and at sites in the open ocean spaced 200 miles apart. The filters are frozen and sent to Rockville, where the DNA is shotgun sequenced by scores of automated analyzers and a nest of computers, because 1% of the microbes in sea water can be cultured, DNA sequences are assembled and classified without traditional techniques. With all these new wondrous techniques it's no wonder that the mad man J. Craig Venter is such innovator.
  I was fortunate enough to discuss metagenomics with Dr. Pablo Zamora, and he told me about all the new things now possible with metagenomics. When asked to break down his job he said " there are times when I'm in the lab and other times I'm in the lush jungles of Mexico traveling in search of environmental samples." Dr. Pablo Zamora has definitely traversed the globe, he has even trekked to Antartica in search of a unique plant. |
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