Uncovering Uncultivated Microbes in the Human Gut
In Nature, researchers in Berkeley Lab’s Biosciences Area, the Gladstone Institutes, and the Chan-Zuckerberg Biohub presented nearly 61,000 microbial genomes that were computationally reconstructed from 3,810 publicly available human gut metagenomes, which are datasets of all the genetic material present in a microbiome sample. The metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs) included 2,058 previously unknown species, bringing the number of known human gut species to 4,558 and increasing the phylogenetic diversity of sequenced gut bacteria by 50 percent. This work helps answer the question of why certain microbes have not been cultivated in the lab. Read more in the Berkeley Lab News Center.
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