Cloning the soil metagenome: a strategy for accessing the genetic and functional diversity of uncultured microorganisms.

ABSTRACT: Recent progress in molecular microbial ecology has revealed that traditional culturing methods fail to represent the scope of microbial diversity in nature, since only a small proportion of viable microorganisms in a sample are recovered by culturing techniques. To develop methods to investigate the full extent of microbial diversity, we used a bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) vector to construct libraries of genomic DNA isolated directly from soil (termed metagenomic libraries). To date, we have constructed two such libraries, which contain more than 1 Gbp of DNA. Phylogenetic analysis of 16S rRNA gene sequences recovered from one of the libraries indicates that the BAC libraries contain DNA from a wide diversity of microbial phyla, including sequences from diverse taxa such as the l

SUBMITTER: Rondon MR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC110579 | biostudies-literature | 2000 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature