In 2005, the microbial ecologist Falk Warnecke, of the Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Institute, traveled with researchers from Caltech and the San Diego biotech company Diversa to Costa Rica, where they opened up a termite nest in a tree. The group dissected 165 worker termites, freezing the contents of their third guts in liquid nitrogen and shipping them to Diversa’s lab. After extracting the DNA from the microbial cells, Diversa sent a sample to the institute to be sequenced.
More from the “Bioprospecting Termites” article, a reprint of Lisa Margonelli’s “Gut Reactions” from September 2008’s The Atlantic, at the blog Spectre Footnotes.