Wang Yufeng, Lilburn Timothy G
Department of Biology, University of Texas at San Antonio, 6900 North Loop, 1604 West, San Antonio TX 78249, United States.
Bioscience. 2009 Feb 11;59(2):113-125. doi: 10.1525/bio.2009.59.2.5.
There are hundreds of Biological Resource Centers (BRCs) around the world, holding many little-studied microorganism. The proportion of bacterial strains that is well represented in the sequence and literature databases may be as low as 1%. This body of unexplored diversity represents an untapped source of useful strains and derived products. However, a modicum of phenotypic data is available for almost all the bacterial strains held by BRCs around the world. It is at the phenotypic level that our knowledge of the well-studied strains of bacteria and the many yet-to-be studied strains intersects. This suggests we might leverage the phenotypic data from the data-poor bacteria with the omics data from the data-rich bacteria, using our knowledge of their evolutionary relationships, to map the metabolic networks of the little-known bacteria. This systems biology-based approach is a new way to explore the diversity harbored in BRCs.
全球有数百个生物资源中心（BRC），保存着许多研究较少的微生物。在序列和文献数据库中得到充分体现的细菌菌株比例可能低至1%。这一未被探索的多样性群体代表了一个尚未开发的有用菌株和衍生产品来源。然而，几乎全球BRC保存的所有细菌菌株都有少量的表型数据。正是在表型水平上，我们对已充分研究的细菌菌株和许多尚未研究的菌株的了解产生了交集。这表明，我们可以利用进化关系知识，将数据匮乏细菌的表型数据与数据丰富细菌的组学数据相结合，来绘制鲜为人知细菌的代谢网络。这种基于系统生物学的方法是探索BRC中蕴藏的多样性的一种新途径。
