Future Ben

The J Craig Venter Institute is one of the most modern innovative research centers in the world today. Dr. Venter has stirred his share of controversy with his “shotgun” approach to sequencing. In the late 90’s there was a concern in the scientific community that there was too much data to be meaningful. This notion seems laughable today as Information Technology has caught up to the flood of data, yielding some incredible advances.

Already Dr. Venter has moved past Genomics into what is now called Metagenomics. His recent expedition on the Sorcerer II consisted of sampling seawater every 200 miles in an around the world sailing trip. A common reaction to this is rejection of the idea that anything meaningful could be gained from Venter’s around the world boondogle. But there is a genius behind the Sorcerer expedition. Venter’s thesis is that the ocean can be considered a single living organism with specialized genetics to handle environmental differences. In this view determining species is unimportant. What maters is the genome of the environment. The Metagenome.

What does this mean to the rest of the world? One of the major efforts of the Venter intitute is Synthetic Biology. Why? With a collection of environmental metagenomes a clever Biologist can determine just what genes are necesary to thrive and construct or modify organisms accordingly. Another application is biosynthesis or biogeneration. The Venter instute is working on generating Hydrogen as a fuel source.

This type of forward thinking will lead to biotech’s next great expansion. Data is the key. For this reason The Venter Institute has partnered with UCSD to start CAMMERA: Cyberinfrastructure for Advanced Marine Microbial Ecology Research and Analysis. Once completed this optical network will allow researcher from all over the world to datamine the ever growing sequence information being generated. What discoveries and innovations this will lead to is anyone’s guess.