Ocean Sampling Day 2018

J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) scientists, led by Lisa Ziegler Allen, PhD, are collaborating with Kelly Goodwin, PhD (NOAA), Brian Palenik, PhD (UCSD), and Maitreyi Nagarkar (UCSD) to participate in this year’s Ocean Sampling Day on June 21. The team, which also includes Sarah Schwenck and Ariel Rabines from JCVI, is sampling the water off the pier at Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO).

Ocean Sampling Day (OSD) is an international effort to simultaneously sample the world’s oceans in one day, with the first such event happening in 2014. Following the success of the first event, the OSD consortium has held an event each year since, with continued long-term support from the EMBRC ERIC infrastructure.

JCVI Global Ocean Sampling Program

JCVI has a long history of ocean and environmental sampling, beginning in 2003 with a pilot study in the Sargasso Sea. This led to a two-year effort where JCVI scientists circumnavigated the globe, covering a staggering 32,000 nautical miles, visiting 23 different countries and island groups on four continents. Millions of new genes and nearly 1000 genomes for uncultivated lineages of microbes, as well as a more comprehensive understanding of marine microbiology through community datamining resulted from this historic project. JCVI has been engaged continually in these efforts since, culling the oceans, rivers, lakes, soil, and air to learn about the distinct microbial communities that inhabit each.