Sood Utkarsh, Kumar Roshan, Hira Princy
The Energy and Resources Institute, New Delhi, India.
Post-Graduate Department of Zoology, Magadh University, Bodh Gaya, Bihar, India.
mSystems. 2021 Aug 31:e0084821. doi: 10.1128/mSystems.00848-21.
With the advent of metagenomics, a quest began to identify the dynamics of the microbial communities in different ecological niches. Altogether, this has resulted in identification of microorganisms but is limited to only a small number of phylogenetic groups that can be easily cultured. The majority of metagenomic sequencing data remains unassigned to any known microbial group and is regarded as the "microbial dark matter." Our group is now working on integrating culturomics (isolation of pure cultures) and metagenomics from extreme environments, particularly from hot water springs and chemically contaminated soils. Our target is to culture the rare extremophiles with biotechnological significance by designing culture media based on inputs from metagenomics. While culturomics integrated with metagenomics has been extensively employed for updating the microbial catalog from the human gut, there is a need to extend this approach to extreme environmental settings to explore the microbial dark matter.
随着宏基因组学的出现，人们开始探索不同生态位中微生物群落的动态变化。总体而言，这一探索已识别出了一些微生物，但仅限于少数易于培养的系统发育类群。大多数宏基因组测序数据仍未归类到任何已知的微生物类群，被视为“微生物暗物质”。我们团队目前正致力于将培养组学（纯培养物的分离）与来自极端环境（特别是温泉和化学污染土壤）的宏基因组学相结合。我们的目标是通过基于宏基因组学提供的信息设计培养基，培养具有生物技术意义的稀有嗜极微生物。虽然培养组学与宏基因组学相结合已被广泛用于更新人类肠道微生物目录，但仍有必要将这种方法扩展到极端环境中，以探索微生物暗物质。
