CAMERA: Community Cyberinfrastructure for Advanced Marine Microbial Ecology Research and Analysis
Website
http://camera.calit2.netCollaborators
United States: University of California at San Diego (UCSD), Calit2; J. Craig Venter Institute; UCSD Scripps Institution of Oceanography's Center for Earth Observations and Applications (CEOA) and Scripps Genome Center; U.S. Department of Energy's Joint Genome InstituteDescription
CAMERA is a Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation-funded project under the leadership of the UCSD division of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), to accelerate the field of environmental metagenomics by creating a globally accessible community resource of microbial metagenomic data.
CAMERA builds on pioneering efforts in metagenomics to sequence the genomes of entire microbial communities, often comprising thousands of species. Because of the use of the shotgun sequencing techniques on the community of microbial, viral and pico-eukaryotic species in ocean water, CAMERA will include metagenomic data of hundreds to thousands of microbial and other species at a single location.
The move from traditional organism genome databases to CAMERA-based metagenomics data storage and computational analysis requires the development of a complex cyber-architecture that will allow researchers to retrieve and simultaneously view many sub-components of living organisms and their environments -- their genes, gene mappings, genomes, metagenomes, partial genomes, proteins, synthetic genes, bacteria, atmospheric maps, oceanographic maps, while having high-definition teleconferencing with remote colleagues as they examine the same datasets.