The Venter team sailed from Halifax, Nova Scotia, in the northwest Atlantic Ocean, through the Panama Canal, and on to the Galapagos Islands in the southern Pacific Ocean onboard the Sorcerer II, a yacht turned into a scientific research ship, as part of its Global Ocean Sampling expedition.

While on their ocean-going trip, the research team took samples of seawater every 370 kilometers (230 miles) with the goal to determine whether viruses and bacteria in the oceans could help counter global climate changes. Fellow researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute (Rockville, Maryland) studied the organisms' DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid, the material that carries an organism’s genetic information) found within the seawater samples.

They found new genes and new gene families that can help us live better on the Earth. In fact, they discovered two to four thousand new species of bacteria and viruses and identified about 1,700 protein families that were not in any known protein families. In total, they analyzed about 7.7 million DNA sequences. For instance, they found genes that organisms use to protect them from ultraviolet light from the Sun—those rays that can cause human skin cancer from overexposure.

Their results appear in the article “Sorcerer II Global Ocean Sampling Expedition: Northwest Atlantic through Eastern Tropical Pacific” within the Public Library of Science Journal called PLoS Biology.

Their article can be viewed on the PLoS Biology Web site at: http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.0050077.

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Biology  Climate  Earth  Global warming  Research  Science  William Atkins