小蓝俱乐部

Back on The Road, Mar Menor to Blanes, Spain

May 7th 2010 After a successful day of sampling in Mar Menor and a great local dinner of lobster paella, Chris and I loaded up the van and got back on the road early Friday morning. We had a 757 kilometer (470 miles) drive ahead of us to arrive in Blanes to meet with a team of collaborators...

The Green Lagoon — Sampling in Albufera de Valencia

During our sampling in Spain last year Chris and I met up with Francisco Rodriguez-Valera. Francisco had some great suggestions for sampling sites and one of them was Albufera de Valencia, a shallow hypertrophic fresh water lagoon, located just 30 minutes drive south of Valencia . When...

Road Sampling Starts in Mar Menor, Spain

Before sampling was to resume on Sorcerer II, a 2 week multiple-site road sampling trip was planned. Chris Dupont arrived in Valencia a day after me, in the next two days we would load up a giant rental van and hit the road. On Wednesday May 5th we drove the 322 kilometers (200 miles) from...

Return to Sorcerer II, The Mediterranean Season

Hello everyone! On May 2nd I flew from San Diego to rejoin Sorcerer II in Valencia Spain. Sorcerer II has been in Spain since our last sample in November, during that time her crew has been very busy upgrading systems and getting the rig certified. Sorcerer II is looking great and is ready for...

Looking for a Few Good Genomes (to sequence)!

The 小蓝俱乐部is one of three centers funded by the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) to provide sequencing and genotyping services to the infectious disease community. We are continually looking for researchers who would like to have organisms of research interest to...

Influences of trace metals on biological evolution

Scientists show how trace metal chemistry and global changes in oxygen have influenced the evolution of metalloproteins and the Eukaryotes A paper is being published in PNAS this week about how the varying abundance of trace metals in the environment has influenced biological...

小蓝俱乐部Scientists Recognized by ASM

Drs. Karen E. Nelson and Kenneth H. Nealson are both being recognized by the American Academy of Microbiology (ASM) tomorrow, May 26, 2010. Karen has been elected to Fellowship in the ASM. She is one of seventy-eight new members that have been selected through a peer-review process based on...

Scientist Spotlight: Hamilton O. Smith and Clyde A. Hutchison III

Editor’s note: Clyde Hutchison died on September 27, 2025. Less than a month later, Hamilton Smith died on October 25, 2025. This post memorializes their dear friendship and the quest to construct the first bacterium with a synthetic genome in 2010. Their friendship endured and their work...

Happy DNA Day!

This past March, we had a great time participating in the science programs in San Diego. We ended the month with the SD Science Festival with over 30,000 participants. It was such a busy day - I forgot to take pictures. The venue was Petco Park with hundreds of exhibits and hands-on...

The biggest synthetic genome so far has been made, with a smaller set of amino-acid-encoding codons than usual 鈥� raising the prospect of encoding proteins that contain unnatural amino-acid residues.

By creating a new genome, scientists could create organisms tailored to produce desirable compounds

Critics, however, argue that this effort is flawed from the beginning