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Science 1 December 2006:
Vol. 314. no. 5804, p. 1349
DOI: 10.1126/science.314.5804.1349o
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This Week in Science

Metagenomic analyses of complex communities are dominated by genome "shrapnel"; unless the microbial community is dominated by one or a few species, it is hard to reconstruct the community by computation. Ottesen et al. (p. 1464) have been developing microfluidic devices to perform a variant of digital polymerase chain reaction that samples individual bacteria in complex environmental consortia. They tested their device on the bacterial flora of the termite gut to identify bacterial contributors to homoacetogenesis by tracing pairs of small-subunit ribosomal RNA genes and the key metabolic gene, thereby mapping taxonomic position with function.




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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)