Introduction
If we performed a census to assess the number of microorganisms living in our planet, we would figure out that they represent no less than half the total biomass on Earth. Recent studies in the field of environmental microbiology have revealed the tremendous genetic and functional diversity of natural microbial consortia. Some evidences suggest that millions of bacterial lineages may inhabit the soil, the ocean, and the atmosphere. In soil, the amount of present microorganisms reaches the exorbitant number of billions (109–1010) of cells by milliliter (Daniel 2005). Such a number deserves a little respect.
For a long time, scientists made efforts trying to develop novel culture methodologies for growing different types of microorganisms in pure cultures. Nevertheless, and according to what we could reasonably suppose, the percentage of microorganisms (talking about specific taxonomic groups) we are able to recover by in vitro culture techniques is almost negligible (no...
Keywords
- Bacterial Artificial Chromosome
- Microbial Consortium
- Metagenomic Library
- Antarctic Soil
- High Amino Acid Identity
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Power, P., Berlemont, R. (2013). Antarctic Soil Metagenome. In: Nelson, K. (eds) Encyclopedia of Metagenomics. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6418-1_623-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6418-1_623-3
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