[UCI-Calit2] Upcoming Event: Microbial Metagenomics Drives a New Cyberinfrastructure

[Anna Lynn Spitzer]

Title:                                         Microbial Metagenomics
Drives a New Cyberinfrastructure

 

Speaker:                                   Larry Smarr, director,
Calit2; Harry E. Gruber professor, Department of Computer Science and
Engineering, UC San Diego

 

Time:                                        10 a.m.

 

Date:                                        Friday, March 3, 2006

 

Location:                                   Natural Sciences 2, Room
4201, UCI 

 

Abstract:                                   Calit2, in partnership with
J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, MD, and UCSD's Center for Earth
Observations and Applications at Scripps Institution of Oceanography,
will build a state-of-the-art computational resource and develop
software tools to decipher the genetic code of communities of microbial
life in the world's oceans. The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has
awarded $24.5 million over seven years to create the Community
Cyberinfrastructure for Advanced Marine Microbial Ecology Research and
Analysis (CAMERA). Scientists will use CAMERA for metagenomics research
-- analyzing microbial genomic sequence data in the context of other
microbial species, as well as in comparison to a variety of other
"metadata" such as the chemical and physical conditions in which
microbes are sampled. The CAMERA project will contain the results of the
Venter Institute's Sorcerer II Expedition, which carried out the first
large-scale genomic survey of microbial life in the world's oceans to
produce the largest gene catalogue ever assembled. Sorcerer II is
expected to more than double the number of protein sequences currently
available in the National Institutes of Health's GenBank. In addition to
Sorcerer II's ecological genomic data, the CAMERA database will be
augmented by the full genomes of more than 150 critical marine microbes
enabling new comparative genomics studies.

 

Bio:                                           Smarr is the founding
director of Calit2, principal investigator on the NSF OptIPuter
LambdaGrid project, and co-PI on the NSF LOOKING ocean observatory
prototype. As founding director of the National Center for
Supercomputing Applications (1985) and the National Computational
Science Alliance (1997), Smarr has driven major contributions to the
development of the national information infrastructure: the Internet,
the Web, the emerging Grid, collaboratories and scientific
visualization. His views have been quoted in Science, Nature, the New
York Times, Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, Fortune, and Business
Week, and he gives frequent keynote addresses at professional
conferences. 

Smarr received his doctorate from the University of Texas at Austin and
conducted observational, theoretical and computational-based
astrophysical sciences research for 15 years before becoming director of
NCSA. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow
of the American Physical Society and the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences. In 1990 he received the Franklin Institute's Delmer S. Fahrney
Gold Medal for Leadership in Science or Technology. He was a member of
the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee and serves on
the advisory committee to the director of the National Institutes of
Health and the NASA Advisory Council. He served as chair of NASA's Earth
System Science and Applications Advisory Committee and was the first
chair of the newly formed NASA Science Advisory Council.

 

 

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