An August Wired article describes iconoclast biologist J. Craig Venter’s latest project: sequencing the entire planet’s genome. On a globe-circling expedition, Venter’s yacht (the Sorcerer II) is collecting microbes from seas and lands around the globe, and sending them back to the lab for sequencing. Venter’s whole-genome shot-gun technique used in the race to sequence the human genome, is being extended in this new approach to cross-species genomes: Rather than painstakingly separating out all the different species of microbes, they’re all sequenced together, at once, with the computer tring to sort out which genes belong together.

Given that only 6000 species of microbes are currently recognized, Venter’s expedition seems likely to completely revolutionize at least our understanding of bacteria and other single-celled creatures; the analogies to Darwin and other 19th century expeditions are too obvious not to mention. Expectations are for a collection of some 100,000 new species, and perhaps 10 million new genes, by the end of the two-year voyage. The question then is what to do with this wealth of new data. Perhaps not much different from the question we still have, what to do with all that human genome data…