On Jan. 17, 2006, researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) announced the development of 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 awarded $24.5 million over seven years to create the Community Cyberinfrastructure for Advanced Marine Microbial Ecology Research and Analysis (CAMERA).

Scientists used 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 UCSD Division of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) leads the project in partnership with J. Craig Venter Institute (Venter Institute) in Rockville, MD, and UCSD’s Center for Earth Observations and Applications (CEOA) at Scripps Institution of Oceanography.