微生物单细胞基因组技术及其在环境微生物研究中的应用

单细胞及单细胞基因组学研究是近年生命科学研究的热点之一,微生物单细胞基因组学研究是继微生物元基因组学(又称宏基因组学,Metagenomics)之后新发展起来的,可有效获取环境中大量无法培养的微生物遗传信息的技术。微生物单细胞基因组技术包括单细胞获取、全基因组扩增、全基因组测序以及数据分析等步骤,目前该技术在环境微生物研究中的应用主要集中于探索未被元基因组技术或其它常规技术探测到的新型功能基因,或是对环境中物种丰度极小的未培养微生物的发现,以及对微生物细胞生命进化过程的研究等。本文对微生物单细胞基因组技术中单细胞获取和全基因组扩增所涉及到的不同方法以及应用此技术对环境微生物取得的主要研究进展进行综述。

Progress in microbial single-cell genomics for environmental microbiology research-A review

We compared different methods used in single-cell isolation and whole genome amplification of microbial cells, and summarized research progresses in single-cell genomics (SCG) in studying environmental microbes. The studies of single cell and SCG have become one of the hot topics in life sciences in recent years. As a newly developed technology following microbial metagenomics, microbial SCG can efficiently explore large amounts of information of the uncultivable microbial genomics from environment. Generally, following steps need to be taken to obtain microbial SCG:isolation of single microbial cells, whole genome amplification of the single cells, amplicon sequencing, and data analysis. Microbial SCG can be widely used to explore new functional genes that are not detectable by metagenomics and other traditional methods, detect uncultured microbes with extremely low abundance, and study the life evolution of microbial cells.