A new technique developed at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) will make it much easier for researchers to discover the traits or activities encoded by genes of unknown function in microbes, a key step toward understanding the roles and impact of individual species.
The approach, called barcoded overexpression bacterial shotgun library sequencing, or Boba-seq, is described in a paper published on August 5 in Nature Communications.
“There is so much genetic dark matter – DNA that we can sequence quickly with today’s methods but don’t know the function of – out there in the microbial universe. And the question is, how are we ever going to study all that matter to understand the microbiomes surrounding us? The fundamental answer is – like this,” said lead author Adam Arkin, a senior faculty scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Biosciences Area.