The J. Craig Venter Institute, a nonprofit research center dedicated to the advancement of the science of genomics, has received a $2.5 million grant from the New York City-based Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for a project to study the diversity of microbes in urban air.

Employing the same tools Venter Institute founder and president J. Craig Venter used to decode the human genome, the Air Genome Project will focus on midtown New York City, the most densely populated region of the United States, to find out what microbes are carried in the air. Using filter devices, researchers will gather indoor and outdoor samples and begin to quantitatively characterize their microbial diversity. The samples will then be analyzed at the Venter Institute's Joint Technology Center in Rockville, Maryland, using advanced genome technologies that include high-throughput DNA sequencing and bioinformatics. The resulting data will be made available to the global scientific community and the analysis of that data will be released into the public domain through the National Center for Biotechnology Information at the National Institutes of Health.

"Many bacteria and viruses in the air elicit destructive immune responses in some patients and we would like to explore these genes of interest to human health," said Venter. "We will identify airborne bacteria and viruses and sequence their genomes to better understand the diversity of life in the air we breathe."