2007-01-21 | SCIENCE
Shotgun Sequencing Slime

"It was amazing," said Banfield, a professor of earth and planetary science and of environmental science, policy and management at UC Berkeley since 2001. "These were totally new and very small organisms we didn't know how to culture with standard techniques. This shows the great promise of shotgun sequencing to profile a community of organisms without making any assumptions about what is there." Nearly three years ago, Banfield employed shotgun sequencing to pick out the half-dozen bacteria and Archaea in the mine slime. It was the first successful example of community genomic analysis to profile the organisms in a drop of water - scummy water. But Baker's discovery makes clear that shotgun sequencing can also pick out rare organisms too small to see easily, and too novel to be plucked out by other genetic techniques.

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