GenEx2 kicked off officially in Alison Murray's Molecular Microbial Ecology lab at the DRI in June 2001. The first task stemmed from previous work that had been initiated during a previous field season in the Antarctic Peninsula in 1996. During that season bacterioplankton from thousands of liters of seawater was concentrated, the DNA was extracted and a large contig DNA library was constructed by Alison's Ph.D. advisor, Ed DeLong. Ed's group has since sequenced one of the archaeal clones from this library (Beja` et al. 2002. Appl. Environ. Microbiol. 68(1):335-345).
