Co-cultivation of microbial sub-communities in microfluidic droplets facilitates high-resolution genomic dissection of microbial 'dark matter'.

ABSTRACT: While the 'unculturable' majority of the bacterial world is accessible with culture-independent tools, the inability to study these bacteria using culture-dependent approaches has severely limited our understanding of their ecological roles and interactions. To circumvent cultivation barriers, we utilize microfluidic droplets as localized, nanoliter-size bioreactors to co-cultivate subsets of microbial communities. This co-localization can support ecological interactions between a reduced number of encapsulated cells. We demonstrated the utility of this approach in the encapsulation and co-cultivation of droplet sub-communities from a fecal sample collected from a healthy human subject. With the whole genome amplification and metagenomic shotgun sequencing of co-cultivated sub-communities

SUBMITTER: Tan JY 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7671993 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature