Metagenomics may prove the most powerful tool to revolutionise the study of the microbial world since the invention of microscope, asserts the National Research Council.
According to a new report of the Council, this emerging field, which is about simultaneous study of the DNA of entire microbe community, can give us a far better understanding of the microbes and prove more far-reaching than microbiology.
The Council in fact has called for a Global Metagenomics Initiative in the line of the Human Genome Project to drive the advances.
Microorganisms play a crucial role on earth. They transform key elements into energy and supply nutrients to animals and plants while those helpful microbes in our body help
us to digest food, break down toxins, and fight off disease-causing microbes.
While the focus in microbiology is on individual species of organisms that could be grown in a laboratory, Metagenomics promises to take it further, allowing researchers to study entire communities of microbes, some of which can’t be cultured and hence left out of microbiology’s purview.
Jo Handelsman is the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor, departments of plant pathology and bacteriology at University of Wisconsin, Madison, and co-chair of the committee that wrote the report and he is quite excited by its prospects.
He said,
Metagenomics lets us see into the previously invisible microbial world, opening a frontier of science that was unimaginable until recently.
Shedding light on thousands of new microorganisms will lead to new biological concepts as well as practical applications for human health, agriculture, and environmental stewardship.
