Seeking of “missed” microorganisms

Abstract:

The knowledge of microorganisms in ecological environments is already reached to the level of metabolic process study of microbial community with omics methods from the isolation dependent study. However, the normally used microbial community analysis method which is based on PCR amplification with “universal” primers would cause the “miss” of various microorganisms. Therefore, we need to seek some methods to find the “missed” microorganisms. Although there are critical limitations in cultivation of microorganisms, the modification of cultivation method to isolate novel types of microorganisms or enrich special functional microorganisms is still a useful method to increase the boundary of our knowledge. Based on the metagenome databases, we can analyze the coverage of “universal” primers and can also analyze the global patterns of different functional microorganisms. Because of high content of ribosomal RNA, modified metatranscriptome analysis will become a useful method for the simultaneous determination of active bacteria, archaea and microeukaryotes. Seeking “missed” microorganisms is an important research field to extend our knowledge about microorganisms and correctly understand different earth element cycles.