CAMERA, or the Community Cyberinfrastructure for Advanced Microbial Ecology Research and Analysis, is an online cloud computing service that provides hosted software tools and a high-performance computing infrastructure for the analysis of metagenomic data.PubMed Central: "CAMERA: A Community Resource for Metagenomics"DOE Microbial Genomics: Microbial Genome Databases The project was announced in January 2006, becoming Calit2's flagship project.Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation: Leading Department of Energy Genome Scientist to Direct Joint Marine Microbial Metagenomics Cyberinfrastructure Initiative (press release)
Mission The project aims to accelerate genomic research by amassing a large repository of metagenomic data generated by independent members of the research community at large, by developing a custom bioinformatics toolset optimized for cluster computing, and by offering the high-performance computing infrastructure on which to run it.
CAMERA helps scientists access and work with data from the Venter Institute's Global Ocean Sampling Expedition.Anchorage Daily News: Scientist stalks wily microbes from sailboat In 2007, their GOS dataset was the largest ever released in the public domain.Science Daily: Millions Of New Genes, Thousands Of New Protein Families Found In Ocean Sampling Expedition (press release) The group also places many other datasets for download on its website.
The project is funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation which awarded a 7-year, $24.5-million research grant to the CAMERA project, beginning in January 2006.
History At its inception, CAMERA's mission focused on genomic research of marine microorganisms. CAMERA later expanded its mission to include terrestrial ecology and dropped the word, "Marine" from its original name, the "Community Cyberinfrastructure for Advanced Marine Microbial Ecology Research and Analysis".
People CAMERA's leadership includes: Principal Investigator Larry Smarr (UCSD) Executive Director Paul Gilna (UCSD)
See also
Bioinformatics Metagenomics Microbial ecology
References
External links
UCSD: UCSD Partners with Venter Institute to Build Community Cyberinfrastructure for Advanced Marine Microbial Ecology Research and Analysis