Microbiome Research
Why rely on culturing and complex metagenomic analyses if you can resolve a bacterial genome from a single cell?
Microorganisms are ubiquitous, representing the most abundant—but least characterized—group of life on Earth. Their innumerable and intricate symbiotic and pathogenic relationships have a profound impact on human well-being and global sustainability.
Microbes have a critical impact on the health of their hosts in the context of diseases caused by single infectious agents, or the complex biology of our gut microbiomes. In addition, they have provided us with therapeutic biomolecules and tools for food production, bioprocessing and molecular biology. Nevertheless, their genetic material remains a largely untapped resource. The discovery and characterization of microbial genomes continues to be hampered by an inability to recover sufficient material for bulk whole genome sequencing.
BioSkryb’s versatile and scalable single-cell whole genome amplification (WGA) technology (PTA) and powerful bioinformatics platform (BaseJumper™) removes a critical bottleneck in microbiome research and bioprospecting by enabling the recovery of high-quality, near-complete genomes from individual bacterial cells, whether cultured or from environmental/clinical metagenomic samples. As such, PTA promises to advance discovery of novel microbial species, and unlock our understanding of microbial diversity and functional genomics for a wide range of applications in microbiome research, medicine, agriculture, and biotechnology.