The title says it all – how does it differ from sequencing, why are we doing this, and why has this not been done from the very beginning?
In: 1
Sequencing is how we get the DNA or RNA sequence from an organism. Genomics is the sequencing of the genome (the genetic material) from an organism. Metagenomics is sequencing the genome of many organisms to understand the community or population based on a sample. There’s going to be some elements that are similar between the same species and some elements that are different – so metagenomics allows us to analyse which elements are which. Or the reverse: we can find sequences that are unique to a particular species and sequence a lot of different genomes at once to find out the relative number of each species in a population.
Sequencing started off being really expensive and we could only practically sequence short segments of the genome. With newer technology, we can now sequence the whole genome much faster and cheaper which allows us to sequence many organisms for the same cost and time as it would have taken for a partial genome from a single organism in the past. Why are we doing it now and not before? We didn’t have the technology until now.
A genome is all the genes in one organism.
A metagenome is all the genes in multiple organisms.
That is for example important if you wanna know what ground bacteria do.
In a lump of dirt there are thousands of species of bacteria and microbes and stuff, isolating and analyzing every single one and then recreate how they may interact with each other is an impossible task.
But just throwing all the little fuckers in one pot and looking at the genes is possible and also tells you a lot.
So there are genes in there for turning sugar into acid, and others for turning acid into fertilizer?
Is that one bacteria doing both, or two species each doing one, or are there 15 different ones that all do the first step, 45 that do the second step and 12 that do both?
Too hard to find out, but we know now, that this environment has the ability to turn sugar into fertilizer. However exactly that’s happening.
The title says it all – how does it differ from sequencing, why are we doing this, and why has this not been done from the very beginning?
In: 1
Sequencing is how we get the DNA or RNA sequence from an organism. Genomics is the sequencing of the genome (the genetic material) from an organism. Metagenomics is sequencing the genome of many organisms to understand the community or population based on a sample. There’s going to be some elements that are similar between the same species and some elements that are different – so metagenomics allows us to analyse which elements are which. Or the reverse: we can find sequences that are unique to a particular species and sequence a lot of different genomes at once to find out the relative number of each species in a population.
Sequencing started off being really expensive and we could only practically sequence short segments of the genome. With newer technology, we can now sequence the whole genome much faster and cheaper which allows us to sequence many organisms for the same cost and time as it would have taken for a partial genome from a single organism in the past. Why are we doing it now and not before? We didn’t have the technology until now.
A genome is all the genes in one organism.
A metagenome is all the genes in multiple organisms.
That is for example important if you wanna know what ground bacteria do.
In a lump of dirt there are thousands of species of bacteria and microbes and stuff, isolating and analyzing every single one and then recreate how they may interact with each other is an impossible task.
But just throwing all the little fuckers in one pot and looking at the genes is possible and also tells you a lot.
So there are genes in there for turning sugar into acid, and others for turning acid into fertilizer?
Is that one bacteria doing both, or two species each doing one, or are there 15 different ones that all do the first step, 45 that do the second step and 12 that do both?
Too hard to find out, but we know now, that this environment has the ability to turn sugar into fertilizer. However exactly that’s happening.
Latest Answers