2015 AAAS Annual Meeting (12-16 February 2015)

February 12 - 16, 2015

Novel Technologies for Exploring the Uncultivated Microbial Majority

The vast majority of bacterial, archaeal, and viral species on our planet are yet uncultivated, which has hampered our ability to study these elusive yet globally important organisms. They play critical but often uncharacterized roles in carbon and nutrient cycling in terrestrial and aquatic environments as well as in plant and animal growth and health. Traditional approaches of metagenomics and more recently single-cell genomics have provided invaluable insights into their coding potential, yet functional and phenotypic characterization are challenging in a cultivation-independent setting. As a result, much of the sequence data remain poorly annotated, and many hypothesized functions remain untested. This symposium will focus on experimental and analytic techniques that enable the genomic analysis of uncultivated environmental organisms; in particular, those that enhance genome recovery and functional annotation. Moreover, methods complementing the sequence data with additional information about the organisms, such as substrate uptake and metabolism, will be discussed.