Taking some time out from his research expedition aboard the Sorcerer II, Craig Venter spoke with around 30 students from Environmental Microbiology about his ambitious environmental sequencing projects. Founder of the Venter Institute (Rockville, Maryland, USA) a non-profit organisation that employs approximately 200 staff and scientists, Craig Venter was instrumental in decoding the human genome sequence and has spearheaded the largest-scale environmental sequencing projects to date. These projects apply shotgun genomics to whole environments in order to characterise their microbial diversity. Application of these techniques to samples collected from the Sargasso Sea near Bermuda have yielded a mind-boggling 1.3 million new genes and identified at least 1,800 new species. Dr Venter has been circumnavigating the globe in the Sorcerer II, a 100 ft yacht/research vessel since Spring 2003 with the aim of sampling and discovering microbes around the world.