Amazon Expedition

Yesterday, JCVI expedition scientist Jeff Hoffman embarked from Manaus on a sampling expedition of the Amazon River and its tributaries, which contains 1/5th of the Earth’s river flow. In collaboration with scientists Dr. Guilherme Oliviera and Dr. Sara Cuadros from the Centro de Excelencia em Bioinformatica (CEBIO) of Belo Horizonte, Jeff is taking samples to characterize the genomes of microbes found along 2/3rds of the entire Amazon watershed, including inflowing rivers from Manaus to Macapa.

Our collaborators at CEBIO will be sequencing the samples with a joint Brazil-USA effort on analysis. Long recognized for the biodiversity of visible organisms, the Amazon is understudied with regards to the diversity of microscopic organisms and this expedition will substantially increase our understanding of the biological diversity on Earth. This work continues, leverages, and complements previous and ongoing JCVI work characterizing the unexplored microbiomes of marine, estuarine, freshwater, and terrestrial environments around the world.

See a gallery of the expedition on Facebook. More pictures will be added throughout the trip.