After the first decade of metagenomics -- adolescent growth spurt anticipated
Mostly hidden from the scrutiny of the naked eye, microbes have been said to run the world. The challenge is how best to characterize them given that less than one percent of the estimated hundreds of millions of microbial species can be cultured in the laboratory. The answer is metagenomics—an increasingly popular approach for extracting the genomes of uncultured microorganisms and discerning their specific metabolic capabilities directly from environmental samples. Now, some ten years after the term was coined, metagenomics is going mainstream and already paying provocative dividends according to a "Q&A," News and Views by the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (DOE JGI) microbial ecology program head Philip Hugenholtz and MIT researcher Gene Tyson, published in the 25 September edition of the journal Nature.