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?
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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.
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.
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