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It was the ultimate mix of business and pleasure – a round the world yacht cruise that doubled as a scientific mission to search the oceans for the building blocks of life.
At the helm was Craig Venter, the controversial microbiologist and founder of Celera Genomics, who helped
map the human genome in 2000.
Venter's 10,000km cruise, which started in 2003 and ended last January, was an epic voyage in more ways than one. Following the route taken by the British scientific research ship HMS Challenger, which between 1872 and 1876 discovered thousands of new marine species during a round-the-world trip, Venter's team on board the Sorcerer II, made some startling discoveries of their own.
Collecting microscopic genetic material from sea water the crew scooped up every few hundred kilometres, Venter extracted the material from the water and sequenced it, uncovering new protein sequences – six million of them, doubling the number previously known to scientists.
Proteins exist in every life form on earth and much can be learnt about organisms by examining the structure and make-up of them.
The aim of the trip wasn't to uncover complete organisms, but effectively to collect snatches of DNA, some of which, it is hoped, may reveal clues to the biological make-up of our ancestors.
Venter didn't follow in Darwin's footsteps to New Zealand, though he did cruise right down the east coast of Australia and spent a year in the region before carrying on to the west.
The richest source of material was the warm Sargasso Sea in the North Atlantic, where the crew collected proteorhodopsins. These are found in the human eye and detect coloured light. Venter concluded that these proteins are used to extract energy from the sun, but without the process of photosynthesis that plants undertake. Other genes found have properties to protect organisms from ultraviolet light.
Much of the work on the material was done during and following the trip at the non-profit Venter Institute, where Venter's colleagues extracted DNA from samples, then sequenced it. Super computers at the University of California, San Diego assembled the codes held within the genetic material to determine what amino acids made up the proteins.
It's an area of scientific exploration Venter has dubbed "megagenomics" and he's making all the information gained from the trip, freely available on the internet.
While the discovery of new proteins is exciting for the scientific community, Venter's research may have more practical applications – such as finding a way to reduce the impact of carbon emissions, which are widely believed to cause global warming.
Because the ocean is a massive carbon sink for the world, absorbing hundreds of millions of tons of it every year, Venter believes the micro-organisms in the sea may one day be harnessed to suck up carbon in larger quantities, taking it out of the atmosphere.
The study of the proteins could also hold clues for the discovery of new drugs and energy sources. It's clear that Venter's boating trip has uncovered the tip of what could be a very large iceberg for the scientific community.
Virtual treasure
A batch of research based on Venter's round-the-world expedition has been published as three reports on the Public Library of Science journal. The articles are filled with words and acronyms the non-specialist reader won't understand, but with perseverance it starts to make sense. Nicely presented, a fantastic online scientific resource.
http://biology.plosjournals.org/
Sea sorcerer
The website of the Sorcerer II expedition, shows its route on a beautiful animated map, provides information about the yacht and its crew and how the research was undertaken. A well-designed site with plenty of interesting content.
www.sorcerer2expedition.org
The human genome
The online home of the Human Genome Project with everything you ever wanted to know about the 13-year project to identify all the, approximately, 20,000-25,000 genes in human DNA.
www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human – Genome/home.shtml