Microorganisms; they are the most abundant form of life. They are all around us, silent, unseen and undetected. The number of ‘species’ of archaea and bacteria climbs every year and is predicted to rise well past one million (1). Despite their abundance, we know very little about all but a small fraction of these diverse cellular life forms because we are unable to cultivate most in a laboratory setting. In fact, 88% of all our microbial isolates belong to just four bacterial phyla (Proteobacteria, Firmicutes, Actinobacteria and Bacterioidetes; 2). The remaining branches of the microbial phylogenetic tree range from underrepresented to virtually unknown and are collectively referred to as “microbial dark matter”.
If you want to target those shadowy, ill-defined branches where exotic and underrepresented organisms belong, you go to environments that might harbor them. Towards this end, Christian Rinke and a large coalition of co-authors collected samples from a wide and varied choice of habitats including the South Atlantic tropical gyre, the Homestake Mine in South Dakota, the Great Boiling Spring in Nevada, the sediment at the bottom of the Etoliko Lagoon in Greece and even a bioreactor. Continue reading “The Power of One: Revealing Microbial Dark Matter Using Single-Cell Sequencing”
“Why? Why? Why?” Anyone who has been around small children has experienced the monotonous, often aggravating, seemingly endless barrage of the “W” word. Why does soap make bubbles? Why do feathers float and acorns fall to the ground? Why are baths important? Why are those flowers purple? Why can’t I be purple? Why do tigers have stripes and leopards have spots and lions don’t have anything (majestic manes not withstanding)? Why can rocks bounce (skip) off water? Why didn’t my rock bounce? Why does the plant in the window bend toward the light? Why are my eyes blue and my brother’s eyes brown?
While the forensic and general communities continue to argue about the merits of the recent Supreme Court ruling on collection of samples from arrestees prior to conviction, I am fascinated by the technology that make this question relevant. The conventional way of generating a DNA profile from a sample by STR (short tandem repeat) analysis is a long process involving a series of steps that require sophisticated expensive equipment, trained personnel and, more importantly, time. The actual process of DNA analysis consists of a) sample collection, b) DNA extraction, c) PCR amplification using 16 or more unique fluorescently labeled primer sets d) capillary electrophoresis to size labeled DNA amplicons, e) software analysis to size DNA fragments and allele calls based on migration of allelic ladder fragments, and f) comparison to known profiles in the database. This entire workflow can typically take days or even weeks, and therefore it is not surprising that we see newspaper reports of backlogs of criminal and other property cases. With these time ranges, the sample collected at a site would be of no practical use to most ongoing investigations. 
