MUSIC: "Our World" theme
A new survey of microscopic marine life has identified six million new genes in samples of seawater taken from the western Atlantic, the Caribbean, and the South Pacific off the coast of Latin America.
It's the product of a round-the-world voyage by a scientific team led by Craig Venter, the man best-known for having developed technologies to speed the sequencing of the human genome. Lately, he's been trolling the oceans, turning up vast amounts of previously-unknown genetic material from micro-organisms.
As we reported on Our World last May, Venter had already found abundant genetic material floating in the Sargasso Sea, part of the Atlantic previously considered virtually lifeless.
VENTER: "I had the notion that we might find organisms in other parts of the ocean that were more abundant there than they were in the Sargasso sea. And by sequencing multiple sites we might be able to compile an actual sequence database of the ocean's genome."
The quantity and diversity of genetic material in the oceans has been the big surprise of the work. Venter says there were differences in samples taken as little as 300 kilometers apart, and there were variations linked to specific environmental characteristics of the water.
VENTER: "We found these based on temperature, salinity, a number of different factors. In fact, we can actually tell where in the ocean a sample derived from, totally by its DNA sequences."
That could be useful, he said, for determining where a ship took on ballast water.
To process all the genetic information and make it available to researchers, a huge database called CAMERA has been loaded onto a specially-built supercomputer. If you have a computer, it probably has one processor and maybe 100 gigabytes of disk space. CAMERA principal investigator Larry Smarr says this one has 512 processors and 100,000 gigabytes of disk space.
SMARR: "This is necessary because the diversity, the biodiversity that Craig's team discovered was so great that the tools that are going to be needed to dig out the biology from this are going to be quite sophisticated and take a very large amount of computing time."
Researchers can connect with the data over the public Internet, but it's also being made available over special high-speed links because of the huge amount of data involved. In addition to the actual genetic information, the database includes so-called metagenomic information, such as when and where the sample was obtained, environmental conditions, satellite images, and so on.
So what use is all this? Like any kind of basic research, it's hard to predict exactly what will come of it, but Shibu Yooseph of the Craig Venter Institute says one likely beneficiary will be the medical field.
YOOSEPH: "In our paper we're describing a whole bunch of new genes that help with repairing damage caused to DNA by ultraviolet radiation. You know, this could be sort of a starting point to figure out, you know, what are the pathways involved in repair, and that could lead to ? who knows? ? coming up with medicines that can deal with certain types of cancers, skin cancers, for example."
Craig Venter adds that even micro-organisms have defense mechanisms, and they often take the form of complex molecules that potentially could be replicated and harnessed for use as new antibiotics and anti-viral drugs, at a time when disease-causing microbes are developing resistance to established drug treatments and posing an ominous new threat to public health.
The scientists published their findings this week in the open-access journal PLoS Biology.
Severely polluted air has become the norm in many Asian cities today. Industry, power plants and motor vehicles are all part of the problem. And as VOA's Rosanne Skirble reports, scientists believe it has the potential to change weather patterns far beyond Asia.
SKIRBLE: Texas A&M atmospheric scientist Renyi Zhang studies tiny airborne particles known as aerosols that are suspended in the clouds. Some of these tiny particles, such as sea salt, are natural; but others, such as soot and sulfates, are produced when coal is burned.
Zhang says his research is the first to link Asian air pollution and changing Pacific weather patterns. He explains that the abundance of aerosol pollutants changes how clouds are formed.
ZHANG: "What we have found is that over the last decade, the amount of deep convective clouds has increased from somewhere between 20 and 50 percent."
