Skip to main content

Sequencing of Genomes from Environmental Single Cells

  • Protocol
  • First Online:
Next Generation Sequencing

Part of the book series: Methods in Molecular Biology ((MIMB,volume 1712))

Abstract

Sequencing of single bacterial and archaeal cells is an important methodology that provides access to the genetic makeup of uncultivated microorganisms. We here describe the high-throughput fluorescence-activated cell sorting-based isolation of single cells from the environment, their lysis and strand displacement-mediated whole genome amplification. We further outline 16S rRNA gene sequence-based screening of single-cell amplification products, their preparation for Illumina sequencing libraries, and finally propose computational methods for read and contig level quality control of the resulting sequence data.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Institutional subscriptions

References

  1. Amann RI, Ludwig W, Schleifer KH (1995) Phylogenetic identification and in situ detection of individual microbial cells without cultivation. Microbiol Rev 59:143–169

    CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  2. Eloe-Fadrosh EA, Ivanova NN, Woyke T, Kyrpides NC (2016) Metagenomics uncovers gaps in amplicon-based detection of microbial diversity. Nat Microbiol 1:15032

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  3. Rinke C, Schwientek P, Sczyrba A, Ivanova NN, Anderson IJ, Cheng J-F, Darling A, Malfatti S, Swan BK, Gies EA, Dodsworth JA, Hedlund BP, Tsiamis G, Sievert SM, Liu W-T, Eisen JA, Hallam SJ, Kyrpides NC, Stepanauskas R, Rubin EM, Hugenholtz P, Woyke T (2013) Insights into the phylogeny and coding potential of microbial dark matter. Nature 499:431–437

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  4. McLean JS, Lombardo M-J, Badger JH, Edlund A, Novotny M, Yee-Greenbaum J, Vyahhi N, Hall AP, Yang Y, Dupont CL, Ziegler MG, Chitsaz H, Allen AE, Yooseph S, Tesler G, Pevzner PA, Friedman RM, Nealson KH, Venter JC, Lasken RS (2013) Candidate phylum TM6 genome recovered from a hospital sink biofilm provides genomic insights into this uncultivated phylum. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 110:E2390–E2399

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  5. Thomas T, Gilbert J, Meyer F (2012) Metagenomics – a guide from sampling to data analysis. Microb Inform Exp 2:3

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  6. Stepanauskas R (2012) Single cell genomics: an individual look at microbes. Curr Opin Microbiol 15:613–620

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  7. Clingenpeel S, Schwientek P, Hugenholtz P, Woyke T (2014) Effects of sample treatments on genome recovery via single-cell genomics. Isme J:1–4. https://doi.org/10.1038/ismej.2014.92

  8. Marcy Y, Ouverney C, Bik EM, Lösekann T, Ivanova NN, Martin HG, Szeto E, Platt D, Hugenholtz P, Relman DA, Quake SR (2007) Dissecting biological ‘dark matter’ with single-cell genetic analysis of rare and uncultivated TM7 microbes from the human mouth. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 104:11889–11894

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  9. Gawad C, Koh W, Quake SR (2016) Single-cell genome sequencing: current state of the science. Nat Rev Genet 17:175–188

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  10. Lo S-J, Yao D-J (2015) Get to understand more from single-cells: current studies of microfluidic-based techniques for single-cell analysis. Int J Mol Sci 16:16763–16777

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  11. Stepanauskas R, Sieracki ME (2007) Matching phylogeny and metabolism in the uncultured marine bacteria, one cell at a time. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 104:9052–9057

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  12. Swan BK, Tupper B, Sczyrba A, Lauro FM, Martinez-Garcia M, González JM, Luo H, Wright JJ, Landry ZC, Hanson NW, Thompson BP, Poulton NJ, Schwientek P, Acinas SG, Giovannoni SJ, Moran MA, Hallam SJ, Cavicchioli R, Woyke T, Stepanauskas R (2013) Prevalent genome streamlining and latitudinal divergence of planktonic bacteria in the surface ocean. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 110:11463–11468

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  13. Zong C, Lu S, Chapman AR, Xie XS (2012) Genome-wide detection of single-nucleotide and copy-number variations of a single human cell. Science 338:1622–1626

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  14. Landry ZC, Giovanonni SJ, Quake SR, Blainey PC (2013) Optofluidic cell selection from complex microbial communities for single-genome analysis. Methods Enzymol 531:61–90

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  15. Hoeijmakers W, Bártfai R, Françoijs K-J, Stunnenberg HG (2011) Linear amplification for deep sequencing. Nat Protoc 6:1026–1036

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  16. Duhaime MB, Deng L, Poulos BT, Sullivan MB (2012) Towards quantitative metagenomics of wild viruses and other ultra-low concentration DNA samples: a rigorous assessment and optimization of the linker amplification method. Environ Microbiol 14:2526–2537

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  17. Kashtan N, Roggensack SE, Rodrigue S, Thompson JW, Biller SJ, Coe A, Ding H, Marttinen P, Malmstrom RR, Stocker R, Follows MJ, Stepanauskas R, Chisholm SW (2014) Single-cell genomics reveals hundreds of coexisting subpopulations in wild Prochlorococcus. Science 344:416–420

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  18. Marine R, McCarren C, Vorrasane V, Nasko D, Crowgey E, Polson SW, Wommack KE (2014) Caught in the middle with multiple displacement amplification: the myth of pooling for avoiding multiple displacement amplification bias in a metagenome. Microbiome 2:3

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  19. Lasken RS, Stockwell TB (2007) Mechanism of chimera formation during the multiple displacement amplification reaction. BMC Biotechnol 7:19

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  20. Woyke T, Xie G, Copeland A, González JM, Han C, Kiss H, Saw JH, Senin P, Yang C, Chatterji S, Cheng J-F, Eisen JA, Sieracki ME, Stepanauskas R (2009) Assembling the marine metagenome, one cell at a time. PLoS One 4:e5299

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  21. Blainey PC (2013) The future is now: single-cell genomics of bacteria and archaea. FEMS Microbiol Rev 37:407–427

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  22. Woyke T, Xie G, Copeland A, González JM, Han C, Kiss H, Saw JH, Senin P, Yang C, Chatterji S, Cheng J-F, Eisen JA, Sieracki ME, Stepanauskas R (2011) Decontamination of MDA reagents for single cell whole genome amplification. PLoS One 6:e26161

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  23. Schmieder R, Edwards R (2011) Fast identification and removal of sequence contamination from genomic and metagenomic datasets. PLoS One 6:e17288

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  24. Tennessen K, Andersen E, Clingenpeel S, Rinke C, Lundberg DS, Han J, Dangl JL, Ivanova NN, Woyke T, Kyrpides N, Pati A (2015) ProDeGe: a computational protocol for fully automated decontamination of genomes. ISME J. https://doi.org/10.1038/ismej.2015.100

  25. Parks, D. H., Imelfort, M., Skennerton, C. T., Hugenholtz, P. & Tyson, G. W. (2015) CheckM: assessing the quality of microbial genomes recovered from isolates, single cells, and metagenomes. https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.554v2

  26. Lasken RS, McLean JS (2014) Recent advances in genomic DNA sequencing of microbial species from single cells. Nat Rev Genet 15:577–584

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  27. Rinke C, Lee J, Nath N, Goudeau D, Thompson B, Poulton N, Dmitrieff E, Malmstrom R, Stepanauskas R, Woyke T (2014) Obtaining genomes from uncultivated environmental microorganisms using FACS-based single-cell genomics. Nat Protoc 9:1038–1048

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  28. Stepanauskas R, Fergusson EA, Brown J, Poulton NJ, Tupper B, Labonté JM, Becraft ED, Brown JM, Pachiadaki MG, Povilaitis T, Thompson BP, Mascena CJ, Bellows WK, Lubys A (2017) Improved genome recovery and integrated cell-size analyses of individual uncultured microbial cells and viral particles. Nat Commun 8:84. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-017-00128-z

  29. Bankevich A, Nurk S, Antipov D, Gurevich AA, Dvorkin M, Kulikov AS, Lesin VM, Nikolenko SI, Pham S, Prjibelski AD, Pyshkin AV, Sirotkin AV, Vyahhi N, Tesler G, Alekseyev MA, Pevzner PA (2012) SPAdes: a new genome assembly algorithm and its applications to single-cell sequencing. J Comput Biol 19:455–477

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  30. Bolger AM, Lohse M, Usadel B (2014) Trimmomatic: a flexible trimmer for Illumina sequence data. Bioinformatics 30:2114–2120. https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btu170

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  31. Markowitz VM, Chen I-MA, Chu K, Szeto E, Palaniappan K, Pillay M, Ratner A, Huang J, Pagani I, Tringe S, Huntemann M, Billis K, Varghese N, Tennessen K, Mavromatis K, Pati A, Ivanova NN, Kyrpides NC (2014) IMG/M 4 version of the integrated metagenome comparative analysis system. Nucleic Acids Res 42:D568–D573

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgment

The work conducted by the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute, a DOE Office of Science User Facility, is supported under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231. We would like to thank Bill Andreopoulos for his assistance in preparing Fig. 2.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Tanja Woyke .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2018 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

About this protocol

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this protocol

Bowers, R.M., Lee, J., Woyke, T. (2018). Sequencing of Genomes from Environmental Single Cells. In: Head, S., Ordoukhanian, P., Salomon, D. (eds) Next Generation Sequencing. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 1712. Humana Press, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-7514-3_8

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-7514-3_8

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Humana Press, New York, NY

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4939-7512-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4939-7514-3

  • eBook Packages: Springer Protocols

Publish with us

Policies and ethics