 One of the first actual (sequence-based) metagenomics projects was performed (yet again) by one of the pioneers of genomics, Craig Venter. The goal of Venter and his team was to sample microbes from the surface of the nutrient-poor Sargasso sea (Venter et al. 2004). This particular environment was chosen for this pilot study because it was expected to have a microbial community with relatively low diversity. This assumption turned out to be wrong and the project identified more than a million putative protein-coding sequences derived from at least 1800 different genomic species extracted from the sea water.