Researchers from the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences report of a new approach in identifying unculturable microorganisms from marine environments.

"We present a novel approach to studying metabolic capabilities of the uncultured microbial taxa. Our method is based on fluorescence-activated sorting, whole genome amplification, and multi-locus DNA sequencing of single cells. This allows us to sequence any number of genes in each cell, including those that reveal cell's identity and those that tell us what biochemical reactions the cell is capable of performing", said Dr. Stepanauskas.

The study has been publsihed in this month's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.