Toward a complete view of life on Earth via single cell genomics (2012-2014)
Abstract
A grand challenge in biology today is to sequence the genomes of all forms of life on our planet in order to understand how life evolved and adapted to diverse ecological settings. Most microbial diversity is yet to be represented however, because it has not been cultured in the laboratory. The goal of this Discovery Project is to obtain a representative map of the microbial tree of life using ground-breaking culture-independent methods to obtain draft genomes of single cells obtained directly from natural habitats. The systematic exploration of uncultured microbial diversity using single cell genomics is timely and novel, and will provide fundamental insights into microbial ecology and evolution.
