Bijah Spring, Yellowstone National ParkFLICKR, NPS / JACOB W. FRANKScientists searching for undiscovered microbial species have historically had a choice of two DNA-based techniques. The first is shotgun metagenomics, where researchers extract and sequence the DNA from an environmental sample that contains many community members. This technique can yield information about the species present in a community and their relative abundance, but works best for samples without too much diversity and doesn’t always reveal rare microbes.
The second option is single-cell sequencing, which has the advantage of providing full microbial genomes, but it can be labor-intensive and expensive.
Now, researchers have combined aspects of both strategies to develop a microfluidics-based mini-metagenomic method, which allows single-cell sequencing of many small groups of cells at once. The scientists described their work last week (July 7) in eLife.
The project arose from the desire to do large-scale, single-cell genome experiments, says Stephen Quake, a bioengineer at Stanford University. The resulting microfluidics-based method “brings the best of both worlds from what have been the two predominant techniques and allows us to explore complex ecosystems with a precision that’s never before been possible,” he adds.
Quake, postdoctoral fellow Brian Yu, and colleagues first added a mixture ...
