Mostly hidden from the scrutiny of the naked eye, microbes have been said to run the world. The challenge is how best to characterize them given that less than one percent of the estimated hundreds of millions of microbial species can be cultured in the laboratory.
The answer is metagenomics -- an increasingly popular approach for extracting the genomes of uncultured microorganisms and discerning their specific metabolic capabilities directly from environmental samples.
Ten years after the term was coined, metagenomics...
Post new comment