Genome pioneer Craig Venter dies: right here’s how he remodeled science

The ‘maverick’ scientist Craig Venter — who led a race to decode the human genome, pioneered a genome-sequencing methodology nonetheless used at present, created the primary organisms with artificial genomes and sailed world wide recording microbial range — died on 29 April, aged 79.

Venter is most well-known for main a industrial effort to generate the primary human genome sequence within the Nineties, racing towards the US$3 billion international, publicly funded Human Genome Project (HGP). But Venter’s scientific legacy prolonged effectively past the ‘genome wars’, say scientists who knew, admired and competed with him.

“He is a true pioneer and maverick who revolutionized genomics by enabling new sequencing methods and trying to create synthetic cells,” says Tae Seok Moon, an artificial biologist on the analysis centre Venter based in 2006, the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) in La Jolla, California. “It’s a huge loss for all genomics and synthetic biology researchers.”

Shotgun sequencing

Venter’s scientific profession began in tutorial and authorities labs, the place he developed a approach to uncover practical genes, one of many first functions of automated DNA sequencing¹.

In 1992, he co-founded the Institute for Genomics Research (TIGR) in Gaithersburg, Maryland with microbial genomicist Claire Fraser (to whom he was married for 23 years). In 1995, their workforce generated the first-ever genome sequence of free-living organism, the 1.8 million DNA letters of the bacterium Haemophilus influenzae².

They developed a revolutionary methodology referred to as entire genome shotgun sequencing, through which brief, random strands of genomic DNA are sequenced after which computationally assembled into contiguous genome sequences. In 1998, Venter co-founded an organization, Celera Genomics, to use this methodology to the three.1 billion-nucleotide human genome.

How diplomacy helped to finish the race to sequence the human genome

The method contrasted with that of the general public effort, led by scientists within the United States and United Kingdom, which sequenced the human genome in smaller, organized segments. Venter vociferously criticized the HGP as gradual, wasteful and expensive. After US President Bill Clinton helped to dealer a truce between the 2 initiatives in 2000, a tie was declared at a White House ceremony on 26 June and competing draft sequences have been printed the next 12 months^3,4.

“Together, we were part of an era that transformed how we understand biology, and I will always respect the intensity, ambition, and vision he brought to that work,” says Fraser. “He leaves behind a legacy that changed the trajectory of genomics and biomedical research.”

Tom Ellis, an artificial biologist at Imperial College London who labored on the HGP on the Sanger Institute in Hinxton, UK, on weekends when he was 16, says that there was no love misplaced between the groups. “Venter was definitely not on my Christmas card list,” he says.

Synthetic biology

But Venter’s insurgent picture softened after the genome-sequencing race, says Ellis, when he turned his consideration to artificial biology. After establishing JCVI, Venter led an effort to synthesize a whole bacterial genome. When he and his colleagues ‘rebooted’ that genome in one other microbial cell, work reported in 2010⁵, they claimed it was the primary instance of artificial life — a characterization some scientists quibbled with.