Life's hidden realm revealed

• Autores: Alice Klein
• Localización: New scientist, ISSN 0262-4079, Nº. 3157-3158, 2017, págs. 34-35
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Get ready for an explosion of life. Next year, thousands of previously unknown microbes will be revealed. Bacteria and other microbes are all around us, but we know only about 1% of them. The rest are microbial dark matter. It is hard to study these mystery microbes because most can't be grown in labs. They need the conditions of their natural habitat--be it a hydrothermal vent or our intestines--to survive. Metagenomics gets around this by taking a sample from a habitat, reading all the DNA in it--its metagenome--then using computers to painstakingly reassemble the genomes of all the organisms. Nikos Kyrpides and his team at the US Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute are leading the biggest metagenome project. Next year, they will publish the genomes of more than 100,000 microbial species from a range of environments. They don't yet know how many are new to science, but they expect thousands to be.