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Results Could Lead to Innovations in Curing Disease and Environmental Conservation Contact:
Using comparative metagenomics, a technique that characterizes the DNA content of whole communities of organisms rather than individual species, researchers statistically analyzed the frequency distribution of 14,585,213 microbial and viral sequences to explain the functional potential of nine biomes. A biome is defined as the entire community of living organisms in a single major ecological area. More than 80 distinct populations falling into those nine selected biomes were sampled for the study. "The magnitude of the microbial metabolic capabilities encoded by the viruses was extensive," said Forest Rohwer, SDSU biology professor and study co-author. "This suggests that viruses and microbes serve as an archive for the storing and sharing of genes among their hosts, and influence evolution and metabolic processes worldwide." While researchers expected to find similar behaviors among the metagenomes in every environment, they instead found that the metagenomes have distinctive metabolic profiles. This discovery could lead to innovations in curing viral or bacterial diseases, as well as help develop new methods of environmental conservation.
Faculty members in the SDSU departments of biology and computer sciences, along with colleagues at other institutions, collected samples from nine different types of environments and analyzed them using the SEED system, which contains all of the known DNA and protein sequences from all major genome-sequencing centers in the world. The SEED system was developed by Argonne National Laboratory and the Fellowship for Interpretation of Genomes. "The most unique thing about this study is the wide range of environments that have been compared using identical tools and techniques, something that has never been done before," said lead author Elizabeth Dinsdale, a postdoctoral researcher in the SDSU biology department. Biome samples were from subterranean mines; hypersaline ponds found at solar salterns, where common salt is produced by evaporative process; oceans; freshwater sources; coral-associated waters; microbialites, or sedimentary "fossils" which contain records of microbial life on Earth; fish farms; terrestrial animal-associated samples (including humans); and mosquito-associated areas. The results of the research have been accepted for publication in the peer-reviewed journal Nature and can be found online at Nature.com. Other researchers involved in the study included colleagues from Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia; Argonne National Laboratory in Argonne, Ill.; University of South Florida in St. Petersburg, Fla.; University of Illinois in Urbana, Ill.; University of Georgia in Athens, Ga.; the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Md.; the Genome Institute of Singapore and the University of California Santa Barbara. This project was supported by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the National Science Foundation, U.S.D.A. Cooperative State Research, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. San Diego State University is the oldest and largest higher education institution in the San Diego region. Since it was founded in 1897, the university has grown to offer bachelor’s degrees in 81 areas, master’s degrees in 74 areas and doctorates in 16 areas. SDSU’s approximately 36,000 students participate in an academic curriculum distinguished by direct contact with faculty and an increasing international emphasis that prepares them for a global future. For more information, visit www.sdsu.edu. ### |
