Institute for Biological Interfaces (IBG-5), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen, Germany.
Department of Environmental Biotechnology, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research-UFZ, Leipzig, Germany.
mSystems. 2023 Dec 21;8(6):e0099823. doi: 10.1128/msystems.00998-23. Epub 2023 Nov 20.
A central question in microbial ecology is which member of a community performs a particular metabolism. Several sophisticated isotope labeling techniques are available for analyzing the metabolic function of populations and individual cells in a community. However, these methods are generally either insufficiently sensitive or throughput-limited and thus have limited applicability for the study of complex environmental samples. Here, we present a novel approach that combines highly sensitive radioisotope tracking, microfluidics, high-throughput sorting, and single-cell genomics to simultaneously detect and identify individual microbial cells based solely on their metabolic activity, without prior information on community structure.
微生物生态学中的一个核心问题是群落中的哪个成员执行特定的代谢。有几种复杂的同位素标记技术可用于分析群落中种群和单个细胞的代谢功能。然而，这些方法通常要么不够灵敏，要么通量有限，因此对于复杂环境样本的研究适用性有限。在这里，我们提出了一种新的方法，该方法结合了高灵敏度的放射性同位素追踪、微流控、高通量分选和单细胞基因组学，仅基于代谢活性同时检测和鉴定单个微生物细胞，而无需事先了解群落结构的信息。
