*Image extracted from The National Academies A microbial world indeed...
We live in a planet that is completely dominated by microorganisms. About half of Earth's total biomass is entirely composed of microbes, whereas animals just make up about 1/1000th of the biomass. So far, our knowledge of microbes is very limited and is very restricted to those microorganisms that play a role as pathogens to humans and other economically important organisms (e.g. farm animals, lab animals, agricultural plants, etc.).
With the emergence of Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) technologies, we can expand this knowledge and begin studying microorganisms at a larger scope.
Now is the time to embrace the microbiological sciences. Better yet, to make extraordinary discoveries about the function and role of microbes in every ecosystem. This is where NGS comes handy. High-throughput sequencing techniques are offering us the opportunity to study microbial communities at a large scale, in a field that is now known as metagenomics.
We live in a planet that is completely dominated by microorganisms. About half of Earth's total biomass is entirely composed of microbes, whereas animals just make up about 1/1000th of the biomass. So far, our knowledge of microbes is very limited and is very restricted to those microorganisms that play a role as pathogens to humans and other economically important organisms (e.g. farm animals, lab animals, agricultural plants, etc.).
With the emergence of Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) technologies, we can expand this knowledge and begin studying microorganisms at a larger scope.
Now is the time to embrace the microbiological sciences. Better yet, to make extraordinary discoveries about the function and role of microbes in every ecosystem. This is where NGS comes handy. High-throughput sequencing techniques are offering us the opportunity to study microbial communities at a large scale, in a field that is now known as metagenomics.
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