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At Argonne National Laboratory computational biologists Folker Meyer and Elizabeth Glass view charts of metagenomic data analysed using grid computing resources.
Image courtesy of ANL.
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The traditional method for studying a microbe is to cultivate it in the lab and examine its biology in detail. However, lab cultivation is possible for only a small fraction of microbe species. Scientists have thus turned to metagenomics – the computation-reliant study of DNA extracted from environmental samples rather than from cultivated organisms.
In metagenomics, scientists grind up samples containing many different organisms and extract all the DNA they can, not knowing which pieces of DNA came from which organisms. A one-gram soil sample can contain up to several million species of microbes all mixed together. The scientists sequence small, random fragments of the DNA to identify species and determine how they function, explained Jonathan Eisen, University of California, Davis researcher and head of the Genomic Encyclopedia of Bacteria and Archaea project of the Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Institute, which aims to catalogue genomic data for all major branches of microorganisms.
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