Omic approaches in microbial ecology: Charting the unknown

Abstract

Investigators are deducing genomes, transcriptomes, and proteomes of novel microbes, based on analysis of DNA sequence data from complex environmental samples. Because genome sequence data fall short of covering the microbial diversity in nature, database-dependent approaches to analyzing that diversity have important limitations and biases. Recent glimpses, using omics approaches, into the uncultured microbial biosphere have started to reveal fascinating organisms that expand our spectrum of knowledge of biology. Using whole-community omics to track microbial communities in nature can resolve the roles of novel uncultured groups and shed light on fundamental links between ecological and evolutionary processes.