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Bioprospecting marine microbial genomes to improve biotechnology

The direct recovery of microbial genomes from complex environments is now routine. Going from environmental genomes to laboratory experiments is rare, but the tide is turning.
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  1. A. Murat Eren

    1. A. Murat Eren is at the Helmholtz Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity, 26129 Oldenburg, Germany; at the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, Bremerhaven, Germany; at the Institute for Chemistry and Biology of the Marine Environment, University of Oldenburg, Oldenburg, Germany; at the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, Massachusetts, USA; and at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology, Bremen, Germany.

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  2. Tom O. Delmont

    1. Tom O. Delmont is at Génomique Métabolique du Genoscope, Institut François Jacob, CEA, CNRS, University of Évry Val d’Essonne, Université Paris-Saclay, Evry, France; and at the Research Federation for the Study of Global Ocean Systems Ecology and Evolution, FR2022/Tara GOSEE, Paris, France.

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In the past few decades, microbiology has revealed the astonishing diversity and dynamism of the microbes that define the boundaries of life on Earth, and that collectively undertake some of the most fundamental biogeochemical processes that maintain the habitability of our planet. As rapidly improving sequencing technologies were combined with molecular and analytical approaches that enabled microbial genomes to be recovered directly from complex environments1,2, a new era began in life sciences, in which scientists could characterize the gene pool and metabolic potential of environmental microbes without laboriously having to grow them in the laboratory first. Writing in Nature, Chen et al.3 report progress in moving this journey to the next stage of exploration.

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Nature 633, 287-288 (2024)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-02661-6

References

  1. Woyke, T., Doud, D. F. R. & Schulz, F. Nature Meth. 14, 1045–1054 (2017).

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  2. Chen, L.-X., Anantharaman, K., Shaiber, A., Eren, A. M. & Banfield, J. F. Genome Res. 30, 315–333 (2020).

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  3. Chen, J. et al. Nature 633, 371–379 (2024).

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  4. Gerwick, W. H. & Fenner, A. M. Microb. Ecol. 65, 800–806 (2013).

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  5. Zhivkoplias, E. et al. Nature Sustain. 7, 1027–1037 (2024).

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  8. Schmidt, T. S. B. et al. Nucleic Acids Res. 52, D777–D783 (2024).

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Competing Interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

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