Bacteria still rule: Great Long Now seminar by Craig Venter (and Bonus!)

I finally got to listen to the Long Now seminar by Craig Venter. And, wow, was it great.

If you've been a regular reader of mine, you know that I think Venter deserves the Nobel many times over. He's been the big disruptor in genomics for decades, taking technological risks that made the industry jump forward farther than our prejudices would have expected.

The talk followed a thread through his disruptions, providing a foundation for why he's doing what he's doing now, which is to define the genome of an organism for practical purposes, such as creating biofuel.

One thing that he made me think about was bacteriology. When I was a scientist, we studied mammalian genes, proteins, and diseases. A bacteriologist always felt like someone from the distant past, with a lab full of smelly slimy plates, studying a 'boring' organism. A real microbiologist was studying fungi, like brewer's yeast, the laboratory workhorse and a model system for mammalian genetic and cellular processes.

Well, after listening to Venter, and aligning my perspective with his, it's clear that bacteriology is the domain to be in.

His recent Sorcerer II expedition has re-ignited interest in bacteria and bacterial ecology. With the recent rise in metabolomics (the analysis of all the metabolites in the body), we're starting to realize that our mammalian cells are an even smaller part of the body functions we have than we previously suspected. And as, I hope, the antibiotic era starts to wind down and people start redefining our relationship with bacteria, understanding bacteria has become ever more important.

That makes me think that the kinds of professions that will be on the rise in the post-genomic age are bacterial ecology, bacterial genomics, bacterial virology (phage therapy to replace antibiotics, is a new one for me), and bacterial biochemisty.

Questions I now would like to see answered: what are there bacteria who are exclusive inhabitants of humans, what is the total genomic signature of a human (the sum of human and microbiological), how can we live in a sceptic world (the rise of super-bugs is partly a consequence of our cleanliness).

I don't know if it's just me, but it seems like there's been a phase shift in biology on the order of the early days of molecular biology, with the excitement and promise of a very interesting future.

BONUS: One thing that I heard about that was intriguing was the Personal Genomics project, an open source community kind of project to not only get more genomes to sequence and analyze but also to drive the technology to cheaply sequence genomes (see X Prize, too). Indeed, I've been reading about the biological parts registry and wondering weather we are at a stage of garage molecular biology. But that's a later post. :-)