ABSTRACT
The prokaryotic cells were separated from insect tissue to produce relatively pure microbial DNA, making it feasible to sequence and reassemble the genome despite the inability to grow the bacterium in culture. The different enrichment strategies proposed to improve the odds while screening metagenomic libraries are. Soil is a complex body containing an estimated 10 prokaryotes and more than 2000 genome types per gram of soil, with an average genome type representing less than 0.05% of the soil community. Although this is a fairly crude approach and will not provide a complete separation, it will certainly increase the representation of certain genomes in a library. To selectively enrich for a specific target gene within a metagenome a more practical approach would be to use one of several differential expression technologies that rely on the isolation of mRNA to target transcriptional differences in gene expression.
