Venter and crew set sail for Australian partnerships

Relaxed at the helm of his 95-foot yacht - the Sorcerer II -- on a brilliant Sydney morning, scientist and sailor J Craig Venter has started the Australian leg of his bid to circumnavigate the globe, sampling, sequencing and identifying microorganisms as he goes.

The Sorcerer II -- a floating laboratory equipped with tanks and filters able to sieve and separate microorganisms down to 0.1 micron -- docked in Sydney at 4am yesterday, after a voyage which has taken Venter and his team from Halifax in Nova Scotia, down the east coast of the US, past the Galapagos Islands, across the south Pacific, through Fiji, Vanuatu and most recently New Caledonia.

Australia is the 14th country on the expedition, and the Sorcerer II will sail as far south as Tasmania, and around much of the east and north coast of Australia, before heading into the Indian Ocean towards Madagascar and South Africa.

Approximately 200 litres of seawater is collected every 200 nautical miles. "We are trying to pick sites where there have been other scientific observations," said Venter. "New data will then have a context in which it can be applied."

The filtered samples are frozen and shipped to the Venter Institute headquarters in Maryland, where genetic material from the bacterial cells and viral and eukaryotic material is extracted, analysed and stored.

To this end, the project has set up collaborations with Australian universities and institutes in each sampling region. Here, they will be working with Prof Tony Haymet at CSIRO Marine Research, Ian Poiner at the Australian Institute of Marine Research (AIMS), John Mattick at the University of Queensland, Staffan Kjelleberg from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) and researchers from the University of Melbourne. The Sorcerer II scientists also hope to work with local researchers in Western Australia.

Although all genetic data generated from the project will be made available on a public database, the Venter Institute and commonwealth government of Australia today signed a memorandum of understanding under which Australia retains the commercial rights to the data.

"It is not clear what the practical applications may be," said Venter. "The technique is so powerful that it yields thousands of new genes. Every new species teaches us immense things about biology."

"We are trying to stimulate interest so that governments become interested in doing [this kind of sequencing] more systematically."

A pilot 'shotgun' sequencing study undertaken by the team in the Sargasso Sea in 2003 led to the discovery of 782 new photoreceptor genes, coding for the ability to capture energy from sunlight. Overall, the Sargasso study -- which was reported in Science earlier this year -- found 1.2 million genes, including almost 70,000 entirely novel genes, from an estimated 1800 genomic species, including 148 novel bacterial phylotypes.

Looking back at his career, which included the founding of Celera Genomics in 1998, Venter remains bemused by some early advice he received when he first began in science. "I was told at the start of my doctorate at the University of San Diego that it was going to be difficult to come up with anything new because everything was already known," he said.

His own view couldn't be more polar an opposite. "We are ignorant riders on our own planet," he said.