New method opens window on invisible world
A new approach to studying microbes in the wild will allow
scientists to sequence the genomes of individual species from complex mixtures.
It marks a big advance for understanding the enormous diversity of microbial
communities —including the human microbiome. The work is described in an
article published May 22 in Early Online form in the journal G3:
Genes|Genomes|Genetics, published by the Genetics Society of America.
“This new method will allow us to discover many currently
unknown microbial species that can’t be grown in the lab, while simultaneously
assembling their genome sequences,” says co-author Maitreya Dunham, a biologist
at the University of Washington’s Department of Genome Sciences.