宏基因组学研究进展

不可培养微生物占据微生物总数的99%以上, 这己成为微生物资源开发利用的一个限制性因素。宏基因组学是通过提取某一环境中的所有微生物基因组DNA、构建基因组文库及对文库进行筛选寻找和发现新的功能基因及活性代谢产物的一种方法。它避开了微生物分离培养的过程, 极大地扩展了微生物资源的利用空间, 是现代基因工程一个新的发展方向和研究热点。本文主要对宏基因组的DNA提取方法、文库的构建、筛选策略的选择及近年来宏基因组学在各领域中的应用研究现状进行了综述。

Advances of Metagenomics

It has evolved as a main limiting factor for the exploitation and application of microbial resources that more than 99% of microorganisms in natural environments cannot be cultivated so far by current isolation and culture methods. Metagenomics is an advanced methodology by means of extracting all microbial genomic DNAs in certain environmental habitat, constructing and screening metagenomic libraries to seek novel functional genes and/or biologically active compounds. It can overcome the advantages of isolation and cultivation procedures in traditional microbial method, and thus greatly broaden the space of microbial resource utilization. So it has become one of the powerful research tools for microbiology, biotechnology, soil and environmental sciences, and a new field of genetic engineering. This paper mainly reviewed the metagenomic methodology including genomic DNA isolation, library construction and screening strategies. And this review also outlined the up-to-date applications of metagenomics in various fields.