It’s all about Metagenomics nowadays
The thing with Earth is, it’s completely lousy with life. The only area actually free of germs is the last thing you windexed, and that only lasts a few seconds. In fact, you’ve got about ten times as many bacteria as you do human cells in the body. Meaning, if I were to pluck a random cell out of your body, it’d almost definitely be a bacterium. Ew. (The bacteria cells are much smaller, which is why you don’t get turned away at restaurants)
Metagenomics is the practice of sequencing all the dna in a random sample of goo. Or water, or your spinach. Rather than provide the specific sequence for one specific species (sort of useless when there’s 10,000 species in your body alone), it looks for key markers across the set, to create a basic picture of the sample’s ecology, and what proteins are being made or metabolized.
Craig Venter of human genome fame is using his “shotgun sequencing” technique to sample ocean water around the planet on his ship. While it sounds like a perfect front for a James Bond villain’s evil plan, scientists are gaga over the possibilities of metagenomics. According to Professor Joe Handlesman of University of Wisconsin:
Metagenomics may be the most important event in microbiology since the invention of the microscope. And although that sounds extreme, it is an entirely new way of studying microorganisms and it gives us a completely different picture than by any of the previous methods that we use.
That quote’s from Living on Earth’s segment on the subject, which ran this weekend. And Slashdot’s talking about it as we speak.
