Media Center

11-Mar-2024
Workshop Alert

12th Build-a-Cell Workshop hosted at J. Craig Venter Institute in La Jolla

The workshop will take place March 29, 2024 with registration closing March 19

22-Feb-2024
Collaborator Release

New LongCOVID research launched by PolyBio’s global consortium of scientists

Funding will deepen research on the persistence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in LongCOVID patients and launch new clinical trials

30-Jan-2024
Press Release

J. Craig Venter Institute contracted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to rapidly construct synthetic influenza genes

Genes will be used to help develop seasonal and pandemic vaccines, improving response time and vaccine efficacy

10-Nov-2023
Press Release

Coastal upwelling regions threatened by increased ocean acidification

Increased acidification shown to limit iron availability, a critical element for the survival of phytoplankton, the foundation of the oceanic food web

12-Sep-2023
Press Release

J. Craig Venter Institute scientists awarded five-year, $5.7M grant from NIH to develop phage treatment

Phage research accelerates with the rise of antibiotic resistance to address increasingly prevalent and difficult to treat bacterial infections

07-Sep-2023
Collaborator Release

Bringing cells to life … and to Minecraft: $30 million NSF grant to support whole-cell modeling at the Beckman Institute

Beckman researchers and collaborators received $30 million from the U.S. National Science Foundation to establish the NSF Science and Technology Center for Quantitative Cell Biology. The center will develop whole-cell models to transform our understanding of how cells function and share that knowledge with diverse communities through the popular computer game Minecraft.

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The Green Lagoon — Sampling in Albufera de Valencia

During our sampling in Spain last year Chris and I met up with Francisco Rodriguez-Valera. Francisco had some great suggestions for sampling sites and one of them was Albufera de Valencia, a shallow hypertrophic fresh water lagoon, located just 30 minutes drive south of Valencia . When...

Road Sampling Starts in Mar Menor, Spain

Before sampling was to resume on Sorcerer II, a 2 week multiple-site road sampling trip was planned. Chris Dupont arrived in Valencia a day after me, in the next two days we would load up a giant rental van and hit the road. On Wednesday May 5th we drove the 322 kilometers (200 miles) from...

Return to Sorcerer II, The Mediterranean Season

Hello everyone! On May 2nd I flew from San Diego to rejoin Sorcerer II in Valencia Spain. Sorcerer II has been in Spain since our last sample in November, during that time her crew has been very busy upgrading systems and getting the rig certified. Sorcerer II is looking great and is ready for...

Looking for a Few Good Genomes (to sequence)!

The JCVI is one of three centers funded by the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) to provide sequencing and genotyping services to the infectious disease community. We are continually looking for researchers who would like to have organisms of research interest to...

Influences of trace metals on biological evolution

Scientists show how trace metal chemistry and global changes in oxygen have influenced the evolution of metalloproteins and the Eukaryotes A paper is being published in PNAS this week about how the varying abundance of trace metals in the environment has influenced biological...

JCVI Scientists Recognized by ASM

Drs. Karen E. Nelson and Kenneth H. Nealson are both being recognized by the American Academy of Microbiology (ASM) tomorrow, May 26, 2010. Karen has been elected to Fellowship in the ASM. She is one of seventy-eight new members that have been selected through a peer-review process based on...

Scientist Spotlight: Hamilton O. Smith and Clyde A. Hutchison III

Two of the superstars of science at the helm of the effort to make a synthetic cell (a cell with a completely man-made set of genetic instructions) are Hamilton Smith and Clyde Hutchison, or Ham and Clyde as they are affectionately known to colleagues. Since 2003 when they started working...

Happy DNA Day!

This past March, we had a great time participating in the science programs in San Diego. We ended the month with the SD Science Festival with over 30,000 participants. It was such a busy day - I forgot to take pictures. The venue was Petco Park with hundreds of exhibits and hands-on...

Recomb - Computational Proteomics

I recently attended the Recomb satellite conference on Computational Proteomics (downloads for talk and poster) in San Diego, CA. It was a kind of homecoming for me. I was a computational proteomics researcher at UCSD as a grad student with Vineet Bafna. Many of my classmates were still there,...

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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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