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Submitted on November 20, 2003
Accepted on February 20, 2004
Environmental Genome Shotgun Sequencing of the Sargasso Sea
J. Craig Venter 1*,Karin Remington 1,John F. Heidelberg 2,Aaron L. Halpern 3,Doug Rusch 3,Jonathan A. Eisen 2,Dongying Wu 2,Ian Paulsen 2,Karen E. Nelson 2,William Nelson 2,Derrick E. Fouts 2,Samuel Levy 3,Anthony H. Knap 4,Michael W. Lomas 4,Ken Nealson 5,Owen White 2,Jeremy Peterson 2,Jeff Hoffman 1,Rachel Parsons 4,Holly Baden-Tillson 1,Cynthia Pfannkoch 1,Yu-Hui Rogers 6,Hamilton O. Smith 1
1 The Institute for Biological Energy Alternatives, Rockville, MD 20850, USA. 2 The Institute for Genomic Research, 9712 Medical Center Drive, Rockville, MD 20850, USA. 3 The Center for the Advancement of Genomics, 1901 Research Boulevard, Rockville, MD 20850, USA. 4 Bermuda Biological Station for Research, Inc., 17 Biological Lane, St George GE 01, Bermuda. 5 University of Southern California, 223 Science Hall, Los Angeles, CA 90089-0740, USA. 6 The J. Craig Venter Science Foundation Joint Technology Center, 5 Research Place, Rockville, MD 20850, USA.
* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: jcventer{at}tcag.org.
We have applied "whole genome shotgun sequencing" to microbialpopulations collected en mass on tangential flow and impactfilters from sea water samples collected from the Sargasso Seanear Bermuda. A total of 1.045 billion basepairs of non-redundantsequence was generated, annotated and analyzed to elucidatethe gene content, and diversity and relative abundance of theorganisms within these environmental samples. These data areestimated to derive from at least 1800 genomic species basedon sequence relatedness, including 148 novel bacterial phylotypes.We have identified over 1.2 million new genes represented inthese samples, including more than 782 new rhodopsin-like photoreceptors.Variation in species present and stoichiometry suggests substantialoceanic microbial diversity.
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Paul G. Falkowski and Colomban de Vargas (2 April 2004) Science304 (5667), 58.
[DOI: 10.1126/science.1097146] |Summary »|Full Text »|PDF »
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