西亚试剂：Microbial revolution

Science is only just realizing the full importance of the microbial world. This is thanks to developments such as low-cost high-throughput sequencing; advances in sample preparation that allow researchers to sequence genomes from individual cells as well as from microbial communities; improvements in computing power and imaging technologies; and the development of bioinformatics tools to help make sense of the data.

Thus biologists are gaining insight into the identity and function of microbes that cannot be grown in the laboratory — the vast majority of Earth's microbiome. Currently only 35 bacterial and archaeal phyla are recognized on the basis of classical approaches to microbial taxonomy. Sequencing efforts in the past few years have pushed the number closer to 1,000 (ref. 2).

Newfound groups of bacteria are throwing old assumptions about the tree of life into question, and revealing vast holes in our understanding of the planet's biosphere and its evolution. The discovery in 2003 of giant viruses with hundreds or even thousands of genes shattered the existing definition of living organisms3. (Viruses had long been considered to straddle the line between living and non-living things because of their extreme reliance on host genes.)

It is also becoming clear that microbes provide ecosystem services that are crucial to local and global sustainability. The microbiota in and on crops, trees and other plants, and in the soils in which these grow, provide nitrogen, phosphorus and other essential nutrients. They break down pollutants and suppress the activity of pathogenic microbes. Recognizing the untapped power of soil and plant microbiomes in enhancing agricultural productivity, companies such as Monsanto are investing millions of dollars in research and development in this area.

Microbes in the oceans produce 50% of the oxygen we breathe, and — through photosynthesis — remove roughly the same proportion of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. They also remove up to 90% of methane from the world's oceans. Over the past decade, research cruises such as Tara Oceans and the Global Ocean Sampling Expedition have sampled, sequenced and analysed the ocean's microorganisms. These have provided insight into the roles that marine bacteria, archaea, viruses and eukaryotic microbes have as global primary producers that provide nutrition at the base of the food chain; remineralization (the transformation of organic molecules into inorganic forms); and the deposition of carbon on the sea floor.

Some of the most profound insights in the crucial role of microbes for human well-being have emerged from analyses of the microbes on and in our bodies — their genomes, transcriptomes, proteomes and metabolomes. (These are analyses of genes, RNA molecules, proteins and chemical metabolites). Complex gut communities, for instance, protect us from disease, provide nutrition, and affect our development even before birth4.

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