Scientists Analyze Microorganism DNA

German scientists are using a new computational method to analyze DNA taken from microorganisms that make up more than a third of the Earth’s biomass.

The study by researchers at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg sheds light on the microbial composition of different habitats, as well as revealing microbes evolve faster in some environments than in others and that they rather rarely change their habitat preferences.

Studying microorganisms has proven very difficult in the past, because most naturally occurring types do not grow in the lab. But the German scientists, instead of analyzing the genome of a specific organism, sequence all DNA found in environmental samples.

We have developed a new and very precise method to classify the microbial communities that are present in a given sample, said Peer Bork, joint coordinator of the laboratory’s structural and computational biology unit.

Bork and EMBL alumnus Christian von Mering used the method to classify microbial communities present in four environments: ocean surface, acidic underground mine water, whale bones from the deep sea and farm soil.

The study’s methodology and results appear online in the journal Science Express.