De novo Assembly Vastly Expands the Known Microbial Universe

Samuel S Minot

doi:10.1016/j.tim.2019.02.007

De novo Assembly Vastly Expands the Known Microbial Universe

Trends Microbiol. 2019 May;27(5):385-386. doi: 10.1016/j.tim.2019.02.007. Epub 2019 Mar 11.

Author

Samuel S Minot¹

Affiliation

¹ Microbiome Research Initiative, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, WA, USA. Electronic address: [email protected].

PMID: 30871856
DOI: 10.1016/j.tim.2019.02.007

Abstract

The study of the human microbiome relies heavily on the genomes of bacterial isolates that can be grown in culture. A recent study (Pasolli et al. Cell 2019;176:649-662) of stool microbiome samples generated over 150 000 microbial genomes without any culture, vastly expanding our knowledge of the biases in existing reference databases.

Keywords: bioinformatics; microbiome.

Publication types

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MeSH terms

Geography
Humans
Life Style
Metagenome*
Microbiota*