U.S. to Fund Scientist’s Sargasso Sea Genetic Map

The scientist best known for leading the crash effort to sequence the human genetic map has won government funding to take on an entire ecosystem -- the Sargasso Sea.

The Department of Energy said Thursday it would give Craig Venter $9 million to try to sequence the genomes of every organism his team could find in the sea, an ellipse of warm, algae-filled waters that circulates in the Atlantic Ocean from the West Indies past Bermuda to the Azores.

Venter’s nonprofit Institute for Biological Energy Alternatives will spend $3 million a year for the next three years on the project, U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said.

The project “may lead to the development of new methods for carbon sequestration or alternative energy production and will work to engineer a particular type of microbe that could produce hydrogen, an important component in our clean energy future,” Abraham said in a statement.

Venter, who left Celera Genomics Inc. after it raced with publicly funded researchers to finish the map of the human genome in 2000, said the high-tech instruments used in that effort would make the new project possible.

The Sargasso Sea is an apt subject because it is considered an ecological “desert” with relatively little life.

Known for its warm, crystalline waters, the sea is covered with huge, floating mats of sargassum seaweed, for which it is named.