小蓝俱乐部

Biowalk of Fame

There is a new “Biowalk of Fame” in Maryland, and our own Craig Venter was one of the first honorees receiving a plaque, which is there for all to see as you stroll through lovely Silver Spring. Other honorees include Dr. Martin Rodbell and Ben Carson. The event to honor the...

Moving dirt at 小蓝俱乐部La Jolla

After celebrating the ground breaking of 小蓝俱乐部La Jolla, McCarthy Building Companies immediately got to work preparing the land for construction. First the crew set up a work area to house the staff and equipment needed for the project. The site was cleared and stabilized for construction...

Scientist Spotlight: Meet David Wentworth

During the height of the H1N1 Flu pandemic, David Wentworth was running a microbial genetics laboratory at the Wadsworth Center, New York State Department of Health (NYSDOH) where he was instrumental in developing a method to amplify influenza genomes regardless of strain using “universal...

2012 小蓝俱乐部Internship Program Is Now Accepting New Applications

Wow! Another year has gone by.  Its hard to think it is November - almost December with the warm weather we have been enjoying.  However it did not start that way. The 2012 小蓝俱乐部Internship Program is open to accept spring and summer applications. The application process...

小蓝俱乐部La Jolla Breaks Ground

It is official! On Tuesday, September 20th 小蓝俱乐部officially broke ground on a new La Jolla, California sustainable lab, to be located directly on the campus of the University of California, San Diego. Craig Venter, 小蓝俱乐部Founder and President along with UCSD Chancellor Marye Anne Fox; Vice...

Evaluating Strain-level Variation of Key Acidogenic Species in Dental Plaque Biofilms

The characterization of the dental plaque microbiome, using traditional 16S rDNA profiling strategies, illustrates both the strengths and the limitations of this method. The central limitation of the 16S rDNA methodology is the inability to decipher strain-level variation within a...

Cataloguing the Gene Expression Patterns of Dental Plaque Biofilms: A Reference Dental Plaque Transcriptome

The RNA-Seq method has been widely adopted as an alternative to the use of DNA microarrays. In most contexts, the RNA-Seq method is implemented when a single reference organism is being studied. Our project endeavored to establish working methods to enable the generation of cDNA libraries that...

Surrogate Methods for Profiling Species of the Oral and Gut Microbiome

We engaged in an effort focused on alleviating a substantial barrier facing the human microbiome research community. While powerful, the 16S rDNA gene is insufficiently divergent to allow discrimination of many species and essentially no strains present within communities. The increasing costs...

The Mobile Lab Is Going to Sunny San Diego

Late one evening in January 2006, the mobile lab pulled into the parking lot at 9704 Medical Center Drive. It was such an exciting evening! Within a few days, we had all the lab supplies on it and began visiting students. The first school in the Washington Area was Patapsco Middle School in...

Despite profound impact on bio-medical research, progress in understanding has been slow

Anders Dale says he will move roughly $10 million in NIH funding from UCSD to JCVI.

Synthetic biologists make artificial cells, but one particular kind isn鈥檛 worth the risk.

Gene editing could create a successful vaccine to protect against the viral disease that has killed close to 2 million pigs globally since 2021.

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�