Much of the history of genetics and molecular biology was built using microorganisms such as Escherichia coli and Staphylococcus aureus. Yet these species are the exception, not the rule, in microbiology: Unlike the vast majority of microbes, they can be cultivated in the laboratory, grown in pure culture, and thus, dissected biochemically.
Studying the unculturable posed a problem. In the 1980s microbiologists began using 16S ribosomal RNAs to catalog and enumerate such species in the environment. But this approach says next to nothing about the species themselves. This issue's two Hot Papers represent the next step forward. Jill Banfield, professor of earth and planetary science at the University of California, Berkeley, and J. Craig Venter, head of the eponymous Institute, independently published in early 2004 two studies employing metagenomics to survey and reconstruct genomes from two very different microbial ecosystems.
In metagenomics (or environmental genomics) total genetic material is collected ...
