( at the Moore Foundation. The major fac...)UC San Diego partners with Venter Institute to build marine microbial genomics cyberinfrastructure

In addition to Sorcerer II's ecological genomic data, the CAMERA database will be augmented by the soon-to-be-completed genomes of more than 150 critical marine microbes, also funded by the Moore Foundation, for comparative genomics studies. Venter Institute's Marv Frazier, Ph.D., co-principal investigator with Larry Smarr, said "We are looking forward to providing a metagenomics server complex for the data produced by our colleagues at the Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute."

Scripps researchers will contribute expertise in modeling, analysis and information management across Earth-science observing systems. "We also have a set of world-class researchers in microbial ecology and annotating marine genomic data," said Scripps Deputy Director John Orcutt, who directs the CEOA and is a co-investigator on the new project along with Terry Gaasterland, director of the Scripps Genome Center launched last October. Experts at Venter Institute and the Scripps Genome Center will create annotations for much of the CAMERA genomic data.

The project brings together new technologies of high-throughput DNA sequencing and metagenomic analysis tools on the one hand, and cyberinfrastructure innovations on the other. Together, they will provide new tools to help marine microbial ecologists access and derive inferences from the massive data sets. The tools will allow ecologists, for example, to analyze families of proteins and conduct comparative analyses across multiple genomes.

"Each individual sequence is no longer just a piece of a genome. It is part of an entire biological community," said Peter Arzberger, Ph.D., directo
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Source:University of California - San Diego