ANDRZEJ KRAUZE
We are surrounded by an invisible world of microorganisms—including many species of bacteria, archaea, and fungi—that play fundamental roles in natural processes, from cycling carbon in soil to fermenting food in the mammalian gut. But until recently, there hasn’t been a standardized way of documenting these ubiquitous little organisms, making it difficult to fully understand the extent of their functions on Earth.
In the summer of 2010, 26 leading experts in microbiology and bioinformatics congregated for a workshop in Snowbird, Utah, to discuss the challenges standing in the way of achieving this goal. The trouble, the group concluded, was that while laboratories across the world were rapidly advancing their knowledge of microbes using genetic sequencing, they were going about it in completely different ways, which ...
