Advanced technologies: from single cells to diverse communities

The advent of newer molecular techniques alongside the need to understand more diverse communities has led to a recent uptick in the methodologies focussed on assessing everything from single cells to diverse communities. Two examples are listed below:

SiC-Seq (Single cell genome sequencing): Combining microfluidics with sequencing has led to possibility of sequencing single cell genomes, which was first reported by Lan et al (Lan et al. 2017). SiC-Seq enables the isolation of single cells, subsequent fragmentation, barcoding and sequencing to analyse complex populations, including their key functions. 

BONCAT-FACS-Seq: The Nobel prize-winning technique of ‘click chemistry’ (Press release, NobelPrize.org 2024) was leveraged to create the bioorthogonal non-canonical amino acid tagging (BONCAT) methodology, which was coupled with fluorescence-activated cell sorting (FACS) to create BONCAT-FACS-Seq. This method works on the principle of incorporating non-canonical amino acids during microbial growth phase, thus enabling the isolation of active populations within a community. This has successfully been applied to soil microbiomes deciphering the notion that 25-70% of the extractable cells in soils are metabolically active (Couradeau et al. 2019).

You can now move on to the next page to discover how the development of long-read sequencing has enhanced methodologies like metabarcoding, metagenomics, and metatranscriptomics.