Analysis of Complex Microbial Communities Through Metagenomic Survey
María-Eugenia Guazzaroni, Peter N. Golyshin and Manuel Ferrer
from: Metagenomics: Theory, Methods and Applications (Edited by: Diana Marco). Caister Academic Press, U.K. (2010)
Abstract
Microbes are important for the Earth System, playing a very important role in maintaining the wellbeing of our global environment. Despite the obvious importance of microbes, very little is known of their diversity, how many species are present in the environment, and what each individual species does - i.e. its ecological function. Until recently, there were no appropriate techniques available to answer these important questions. The vast majority of these organisms cannot be cultured in the laboratory and so were not amenable to study by the methods that had proved so successful with known microorganisms throughout the 20th century. It was only with the development of high-throughput technology to analyze and sequence DNA from the natural environment that information began to accumulate that demonstrated the exceptional diversity of microbes in Nature - in fact, most microbes are entirely novel and have not previously been described. Following on from this, in this chapter we provide an analysis of the basic aspect of culture-independent tools to study microbial communities, the methods available to isolate environmental DNA and to establish metagenomic libraries which can further be used for extensive activity screens, and a number of the recent applications of this technology read more ...
