J. Craig Venter and his colleagues, as part of the J. Craig Venter Global Ocean Sampling (GOS) expedition, have been able to identify 1.2 million new genes. Their ship, the Sorcerer II floating lab, sampled marine microbes from Nova Scotia to French Polynesia, across the Caribbean, through the Panama Canal, and into the South Pacific. Eighty-five percent of the sequence data could be assembled, and 57 percent of the unassembled data was unique. Overall, researchers identified genes for more than six million proteins covering almost all prokaryotic protein families with some that represent new families. Forty-one samples of marine planktonic microbiota were collected from the water at the surface of the ocean, about a foot deep in Ecuador, to more than 4,500 meters deep off the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico. Filtered samples were subjected to genome shotgun sequencing and assembled through the use of a modified version of the Celera Assembler program. Douglas Rusch, lead author of the report, stated that some samples were similar but geographically distant from each other. The changes observed suggest evolutionary adaptations and isolated populations showing evidence of distinct environmental preference among organisms. Venter will sail Sorcerer II through the Panama Canal and up the west coast of North America to Alaska to determine if the CAMERA database can be made genuinely representative of the diversity of life on Earth.