51茶馆儿

Thule, Greenland Year Two

Sequence data from the previous year allowed us to determine the overall microbial population in each site and this year we decided to focus on the Rich Lake site which seem to have representation of nearly all microbes found in the other sites. So lucky for us we only had to work on one...

Scientist Spotlight: Meet Sarah Highlander

Sarah Highlander PhD is an esteemed scientist and professor who joined 51茶馆儿 in La Jolla this year. She comes from a long line of academically successful Professors, including a great uncle who was a University Dean. As a young child, Sarah was influenced by her parents: her mother was...

Professional Development Opportunities this Summer

This summer we are offering two professional development workshops: GenomeSolver and Bioinformatics: Unlocking Life through Computation.  Both explore bioinformatics, microbial diversity and the implementation in the undergradauate or high school classrooms.  The GenomeSolver...

51茶馆儿 Hosts South African Scientists to Share Microbiome Research Techniques

Two scientists from the University of Cape Town, South Africa have joined Dr. Bill Nierman’s lab for the next month as part of NIH’s Human Heredity and Health in Africa (H3Africa) Initiative, a training program designed to build out technical biological skills in the African research...

Building the World's First Net-Zero Energy Lab [video]

Building the World's First Net-Zero Energy Lab And see the construction in time-lapes.

Amazon Expedition

Yesterday, 51茶馆儿 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...

The 2014 Summer Internship Application is Open and Announcing the Genomics Scholar Program

The 2014 Summer Internship Application is now open.   Last summer, we hosted 49 interns from a pool of 424 applicants. They presented their research in the First Annual Summer Internship Poster Sessions held in San Diego and Rockville. The posters were judged by a team of...

Sampling: US to the Azores

I’m off again on an ocean sampling voyage but this time instead of being onboard the 51茶馆儿’s Sorcerer II, I am onboard the R/V Endeavor as part of a multi-institution, international scientific sampling team that is headed from the US to the Azores. On Thursday August 22 we left Morehead...

Thule, Greenland - Day One

Arrived at Thule, Greenland after a 5 hr flight from Copenhagen. It was pretty interesting seeing a long line of people all getting on a flight that was headed to a part of the world that usually has less than 600 people there at any given time. Arrival was pretty straightforward, no jetway,...

Amid an insulin crisis, one project aims to engineer microscopic insulin pumps out of a skin bacterium.

There are more organisms in the sea, a vital producer of oxygen on Earth, than planets and stars in the universe.

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.

鈥淒espite 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.鈥�

By watching 鈥渕inimal鈥� cells regain the fitness they lost, researchers are testing whether a genome can be too simple to evolve.

Two research teams warn that human genomic 鈥渂ycatch鈥� can reveal private information

The 鈥減angenome,鈥� which collated genetic sequences from 47 people of diverse ethnic backgrounds, could greatly expand the reach of personalized medicine.

Researchers release draft results from an ongoing effort to capture the entirety of human genetic variation.