Media Center

Scientist Spotlight: Meet David Wentworth

During the height of the H1N1 Flu pandemic, David Wentworth was running a microbial genetics laboratory at the Wadsworth Center, New York State Department of Health (NYSDOH) where he was instrumental in developing a method to amplify influenza genomes regardless of strain using “universal...

2012 JCVI Internship Program Is Now Accepting New Applications

Wow! Another year has gone by.  Its hard to think it is November - almost December with the warm weather we have been enjoying.  However it did not start that way. The 2012 JCVI Internship Program is open to accept spring and summer applications. The application process...

JCVI La Jolla Breaks Ground

It is official! On Tuesday, September 20th JCVI officially broke ground on a new La Jolla, California sustainable lab, to be located directly on the campus of the University of California, San Diego. Craig Venter, JCVI Founder and President along with UCSD Chancellor Marye Anne Fox; Vice...

Evaluating Strain-level Variation of Key Acidogenic Species in Dental Plaque Biofilms

The characterization of the dental plaque microbiome, using traditional 16S rDNA profiling strategies, illustrates both the strengths and the limitations of this method. The central limitation of the 16S rDNA methodology is the inability to decipher strain-level variation within a...

Cataloguing the Gene Expression Patterns of Dental Plaque Biofilms: A Reference Dental Plaque Transcriptome

The RNA-Seq method has been widely adopted as an alternative to the use of DNA microarrays. In most contexts, the RNA-Seq method is implemented when a single reference organism is being studied. Our project endeavored to establish working methods to enable the generation of cDNA libraries that...

Surrogate Methods for Profiling Species of the Oral and Gut Microbiome

We engaged in an effort focused on alleviating a substantial barrier facing the human microbiome research community. While powerful, the 16S rDNA gene is insufficiently divergent to allow discrimination of many species and essentially no strains present within communities. The increasing costs...

The Mobile Lab Is Going to Sunny San Diego

Late one evening in January 2006, the mobile lab pulled into the parking lot at 9704 Medical Center Drive. It was such an exciting evening! Within a few days, we had all the lab supplies on it and began visiting students. The first school in the Washington Area was Patapsco Middle School in...

The Hill School: Day 2

The day started early Tuesday with first period.  Thirty eager students arrived on the bus to determine the results of the amplification of the DNA they extracted the day before.  The PCR ran overnight, copying part of a conserved gene in plants, RuBisCo, that can be used to...

The Hill School: Day 1

The day started early with reagent and lab preparation before we even left for school OR had coffee. We expected to do over 100 DNA Extractions as the first step in the DNA Barcoding. We arrived on campus as the first period was starting –we didn’t have class until after 9:00....

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17-Jan-2024
Grow by Ginkgo

Getting Under the Skin

Amid an insulin crisis, one project aims to engineer microscopic insulin pumps out of a skin bacterium.

24-Oct-2023
Noema

Planet Microbe

There are more organisms in the sea, a vital producer of oxygen on Earth, than planets and stars in the universe.

29-Aug-2023
Vanity Fair

The Next Climate Change Calamity?: We’re Ruining the Microbiome, According to Human-Genome-Pioneer Craig Venter

In a new book (coauthored with Venter), a Vanity Fair contributor presents the oceanic evidence that human activity is altering the fabric of life on a microscopic scale.

21-Aug-2023
GEN

Lessons from the Minimal Cell

“Despite reducing the sequence space of possible trajectories, we conclude that streamlining does not constrain fitness evolution and diversification of populations over time. Genome minimization may even create opportunities for evolutionary exploitation of essential genes, which are commonly observed to evolve more slowly.”

09-Aug-2023
Quanta Magazine

Even Synthetic Life Forms With a Tiny Genome Can Evolve

By watching “minimal” cells regain the fitness they lost, researchers are testing whether a genome can be too simple to evolve.

15-May-2023
Science

Privacy concerns sparked by human DNA accidentally collected in studies of other species

Two research teams warn that human genomic “bycatch” can reveal private information

10-May-2023
New York Times

Scientists Unveil a More Diverse Human Genome

The “pangenome,” which collated genetic sequences from 47 people of diverse ethnic backgrounds, could greatly expand the reach of personalized medicine.

10-May-2023
Nature

First human ‘pangenome’ aims to catalogue genetic diversity

Researchers release draft results from an ongoing effort to capture the entirety of human genetic variation.

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