Metagenomics: Introduction

Metagenomics is a new sub-section of genomics. At its essence it involves isolating genomic material from environmental sources, and using this to generate genomic libraries. The genomic material is generally DNA, but there is some work being done on isolating RNA, and using that to generate cDNA libraries. The big advantage of making metagenome libraries is that there is no need to have a culturable organism. The majority of micro-organisms are unculturable in the lab, making it difficult to investigate their functioning. Equally, the types of environments that have often been sampled (marine, mines, hot springs) tend to be "extreme" environments; the micro-organisms generally survive at extrememes of temperature and pH. The thought is that enzymes isolated from these bacteria will tend to be more applicable to industrial applications. Additionally, information from the various high throughput sequencing projects is starting to fill in gaps on "the tree of life"

The big disadvantage is that you are dealing with a mixed culture of organisms. So there is a variety of genetic material present, and identifying which organisms are present, and relating the gene sequence for interesting proteins back to an organism can be challenging.

However, this is a fascinating area of research, particularly with the advent of high throughput screening techniques, and high throughput sequencing techniques, both of which will be discussed in subsequent posts.