Boldly illuminating biology’s ‘dark matter’
July 16, 2013
“Microbial dark matter” is the pervasive yet practically invisible infrastructure of life on the planet, which can have profound influences on the most significant environmental processes: from plant growth and health, to nutrient cycles in terrestrial and marine environments, the global carbon cycle, and possibly even climate processes.
By employing next-generation DNA sequencing of genomes isolated from single cells, great strides are being made in the monumental task of systematically bringing to light and filling in uncharted branches in the bacterial and archaeal tree of life.
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