Global Ocean Sampling Expedition

Overview

The world around us teems with life. But what we see with our eyes is not all that’s there, nor all that is important. The unseen world holds an immeasurable trove of microscopic life. These microbes in the air, land and sea are responsible for creating and sustaining life on Earth. Yet, we know so little about these organisms. In a quest to unlock these mysteries, the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) launched the Sorcerer II Global Ocean Sampling (GOS) Expedition in 2004. Inspired by 19th Century sea voyages like Darwin’s on the H.M.S. Beagle and Captain George Nares on the H.M.S. Challenger, The Sorcerer II circumnavigated the globe for more than two years, covering a staggering 32,000 nautical miles, visiting 23 different countries and island groups on four continents.

After a successful pilot project in the Sargasso Sea in 2003, Dr. Venter and his Expedition team set out to evaluate the microbial diversity in the world’s oceans using the tools and techniques developed to sequence the human and other genomes. With a better understanding of marine microbial biodiversity, scientists will be able to understand how ecosystems function and to discover new genes of ecological and evolutionary importance. Now, the Sorcerer II Expedition has finished its circumnavigation and Venter Institute scientists and collaborators have published the results from the first phase of the Expedition in PLoS Biology.

This publication has ushered in a new era in genomics. The GOS data represent the largest metagenomic dataset ever put into the public domain with more than 7.7 million sequences or 6.3 billion base pairs of DNA. The sheer size and complexity of this dataset has necessitated new tools and infrastructure to allow researchers worldwide access and analysis capabilities. The Community Cyberinfrastructure for Advanced Marine Microbial Ecology Research and Analysis (CAMERA) is an online database and high-speed computational resource developed with funding from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation in a collaborative effort between UCSD’s Division of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), JCVI and UCSD’s Center for Earth Observations and Applications (CEOA) at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. This first glimpse into the gene, protein and protein family world of microbes has shattered long held notions about evolution, function, and diversity. And this is only the beginning…

Funding

J. Craig Venter Science Foundation (now JCVI), U.S. Department of Energy, and Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation