The Metagenomics Revolution
Using traditional lab techniques, the vast majority of microbes cannot be investigated - both because they are difficult to grow out of their native habitat, and because of the sampling scale required to understand the complex communities and functions of such abundant and widespread organisms.
Genomic technologies have made investigation of environmental microbes possible by circumventing the need to culture the microbes in vitro and allowing sampling at a high enough frequency to address questions at large scale.
The 'metagenomics' approach has truly been revolutionary and relies on extracting DNA from an environmental sample (e.g. soil or water), and then sequencing all the DNA in that sample (which will be a complex mixture of DNA from the many species present in the sample). Computational bioinformatics methods are then applied in order to discern what microbial organisms were present in the sample, as well as their abundance.
Before metagenomics, we had no idea that microbial diversity or abundance in and around us was so great. For example, such methods have shown that a gram of soil typically contains 10,000 bacterial species (and 1,000,000,000 individuals), and a millilitre of seawater contains 1,000,000 individual microbes!
Genomic technologies have made investigation of environmental microbes possible by circumventing the need to culture the microbes in vitro and allowing sampling at a high enough frequency to address questions at large scale.
The 'metagenomics' approach has truly been revolutionary and relies on extracting DNA from an environmental sample (e.g. soil or water), and then sequencing all the DNA in that sample (which will be a complex mixture of DNA from the many species present in the sample). Computational bioinformatics methods are then applied in order to discern what microbial organisms were present in the sample, as well as their abundance.
Before metagenomics, we had no idea that microbial diversity or abundance in and around us was so great. For example, such methods have shown that a gram of soil typically contains 10,000 bacterial species (and 1,000,000,000 individuals), and a millilitre of seawater contains 1,000,000 individual microbes!
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