Marine Metagenomics: New Tools for the Study and Exploitation of Marine Microbial Metabolism

Marine Drugs

Jonathan Kennedy¹  Burkhardt Flemer¹  Stephen A. Jackson¹  David P. H. Lejon¹  John P. Morrissey¹  Fergal O’Gara¹ 

[1] Marine Biotechnology Centre, Environmental Research Institute, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland; E-Mails:

关键词: metagenome;    marine;    microorganism;    enzyme;   

DOI  :  10.3390/md8030608

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

The marine environment is extremely diverse, with huge variations in pressure and temperature. Nevertheless, life, especially microbial life, thrives throughout the marine biosphere and microbes have adapted to all the divergent environments present. Large scale DNA sequence based approaches have recently been used to investigate the marine environment and these studies have revealed that the oceans harbor unprecedented microbial diversity. Novel gene families with representatives only within such metagenomic datasets represent a large proportion of the ocean metagenome. The presence of so many new gene families from these uncultured and highly diverse microbial populations represents a challenge for the understanding of and exploitation of the biology and biochemistry of the ocean environment. The application of new metagenomic and single cell genomics tools offers new ways to explore the complete metabolic diversity of the marine biome.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2010 by the authors; licensee Molecular Diversity Preservation International, Basel, Switzerland