THE NATION

Lofty Search for Life in New York

Pioneering scientist J. Craig Venter plans to map the genome of millions of microbes he is collecting from Midtown air samples.

By Robert Lee Hotz
Times Staff Writer

April 17, 2005

NEW YORK — The pioneer of the human gene mapping project, a maverick who sieved the Sargasso Sea for undiscovered genes, is searching for life in one of the world's harshest environments — the air of Midtown Manhattan.

With a hidden sampling station atop a 40-story office tower in the congested business district of America's most crowded metropolis, J. Craig Venter seeks to trap and identify the genetic material of the myriad microbes that 8 million New Yorkers inhale with every impatient breath.

The $2.5-million experiment, funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, is part of an ambitious effort to use molecular biology to plumb the planet's hidden diversity of microbial life — the so-called dark matter of the biosphere.

When Venter sampled the Sargasso Sea in a pilot project last year, he discovered in its seemingly lifeless water 1,800 new species of microbes and more than a million previously unknown genes, essentially doubling the number of identified genes in the world.

The researcher is confident that New York air will prove as rich in the variety of single-celled organisms that drift on updrafts of subway fumes, tobacco breath, pollen and dig-we-must dust.

"The air sampling data is going to jump-start a whole new field," said microbial ecologist Mary Ann Moran of the University of Georgia. "It really is uncharted territory."

Barely 1% of all microbes — the most common life form on the planet — have ever been isolated, cultured and studied in the laboratory. Yet these seemingly simple organisms collectively do more to affect the biochemical character of the planet than any other living thing save humankind.

"Microbes are the master chemists of the planet," said Edward DeLong, a microbiologist at MIT. "Even though they are small, they are the engines that drive the conversion of matter and energy that produce our atmosphere and influence our climate."

Called the air genome project, the experiment arises from a fundamentally new approach to the study of life that depends on a gene-mapping technology Venter invented to sequence the human genome.

The tools give researchers the ability to conduct genetic analysis on a scale undreamed of a decade ago. They allow researchers to classify the creatures they discover, not by appearance, but by the unique structure of the genetic blueprint that controls the organism's growth and development.

The air sampling project is the latest in a progression of microbe-census taking efforts Venter organized.

In a related experiment, Venter is conducting a world cruise to trawl for marine microbes, systematically sampling 52 gallons of sea water every 200 miles. Each thimbleful of sea water contains about 1 million bacteria and 10 million viruses.

Venter's 95-foot sailing sloop, the Sorcerer II, is approaching Africa, having traveled about halfway around the world.

"The surprise is that we are finding unbelievably rich diversity everywhere we go," Venter said. "The diversity is greater than anyone imagined and differs substantially from site to site.

"The Sargasso Sea project doubled the number of known genes. The total number of known genes will increase ten-fold from just one sailing expedition around the world. We really are still in the early phase of the scientific discovery of our own planet."

Although the discovery of new microbes may be valuable as basic research, Venter hopes that the technology being developed through the air genome project will lead to new ways of monitoring pollution.

"The expectation is that it will become a whole new way to characterize the environment. The gene sequence profiles can be the ultimate environmental impact statement," Venter said. "We can measure tens of thousands of [microbe] species and see how they are changing."

The air and the water samples are being analyzed at the J. Craig Venter Institute's Joint Technology Center in Rockville, Md.

As the genome data are collated and analyzed, they are being made available to other researchers through the National Center for Biotechnology Information, the home of GenBank, at the National Institutes of Health.

"It is an incredible bonanza," DeLong said. "What Craig is doing in the ocean and the air is really allowing us to define a big part of biology that has been invisible, not just to our eyes, but to all the other methods that biology has developed in the past hundred years."

All told, the attempt to conduct a systematic census of the microbial world is as outsized as Venter himself.

The DNA sequencing expert was the mastermind of a private effort to create the first complete map of the human genetic sequence.

Using the so-called shotgun sequencing techniques he pioneered, Venter's team completed a draft of the human genome in three years, instead of the decade that others had predicted.

More recently, Venter oversaw a project to design a synthetic virus genome for the Department of Energy, completing in two weeks a $3-million project estimated to take three years.

His critics dismiss such scientific accomplishment as Venter adventures, calling them slap-dash stunts that may be flawed technically or overstated.

His genome technology is much faster than the more painstaking traditional approaches, they acknowledge, but it can also be less accurate.

Other scientists, however, credit him as a pathfinder who can leap over obstacles that have stalled other research efforts, with a gift for raising private research capital.

"It is what visionaries are made of," Moran said. "He is not afraid to tackle a big question. Venter came in and is doing this on a scale that others cannot afford. It is fabulous in terms of its scale."

Even so, some experts have reserved judgment about the scientific value of Venter's latest genome project.

"Manhattan is a really big place, microbially speaking," said microbiologist Norman R. Pace of the University of Colorado in Boulder. "So the utility of any sequencing is [going to be] in the nature of the samples."