Definition
Freshwater habitats, especially rivers, are vital components of terrestrial ecosystems, supporting life much beyond their natural spread. Outside the ocean, nearly all life depends upon the availability of freshwater. River systems have been in the past the cradles of civilization, and with increasing population pressures on this limited resource, they cannot remain unaffected by the demands of human growth that force change and steadily shift the ecology of these natural resources away from their pristine states. It may come as a surprise to many, but most of the important microbiota of freshwater ecosystems that have resisted cultivation efforts are only now being fully discovered due to the advances in sequencing technologies.
Introduction
The technique of pure culture, developed in the late nineteenth century, through the pioneering work done by Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch, and Ferdinand Cohn, has been...
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Ghai, R. (2014). Rivers, Metagenomics of. In: Nelson, K. (eds) Encyclopedia of Metagenomics. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6418-1_41-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6418-1_41-2
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