“Three years ago, Tanja Woyke, a microbiologist at the Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, California, and colleagues decided to head into this uncharted territory by applying a newly developed sequencing approach to bacteria and archaea. Until recently, determining a genome’s makeup required many copies of the DNA, and thus only microbes grown in the lab could be sequenced. But the new technique can decipher DNA from a single cell.”
Learn more about the microbial dark matter study at http://archive.jgi.doe.gov/boldly-illuminating-biologys-dark-matter/
Read the full story on Science.