Chapter 2 Scientific Literature
The most comprehensive source of published scientific research can be found on PubMed database. PubMed offers tens of millions of peer-reviewed publications. This is a to go place for your scientific keyword searches!
The vast majority of all microorganisms on Earth and beyond remain uncultured. As a result, their genomes (or metagenomes) are underdetected and understudied. As such, metagenomics is the ‘black box’ of genomics. Curiosity and threat of microbes are a great driving force behind the advances in the study of metagenomics, which is a culture-independent, direct approach to microbial sequencing and analysis of an environmental sample.
In this module, we will learn about microbial diversity, the field of genomics and metagenomics and the role of sequencing technologies in metagenomic analysis. We will also learn how to read a scientific paper! In Prelab we will read a metagenomics Review paper to obtain a birds eye view of metagenomics from soil to gut and get an appreciation of the diversity and complexity of microorganisms, and of the challenges associated with identifying microorganisms. In Project activity, we will go deeper into scientific literature by reading a recent metagenomics Research paper and dissecting it from A to Z.
