Tuesday, March 15, 2011

METAGENOMICS!!!

It's funny at times to realise how we tend to behave as if we are a single existing entity in this entire universe, knowing that's not true. To make my point more visible, for example today I threw this used plastic cup in the regular thrash can instead of a recycable one, most of us would think it's no big deal (specially not something to blog about..jeezzz!), well if one thinks about the big picture, it might not be so trivial. That one cup could ending up in some part of the world clogging a plant or an animal. I guess the point that I am trying to bring up is that no one lives in seclusion, we are all interconnected not just with fellow members of a species but with hundreds of species around us and within us. Thus it is important for us to realise our responsibility as a member of this big biosphere where we are as important as are other member who range from less than a micron to may be a godzilla in size. And since we were the lucky ones, out of the millions of species to evolve so rapidly and become the dominating organism, it's our responsiblity to do as much as we can to make sure the world can be a better place to live.

I found Metagenomics interesting more from a philosophical point of view, probably was evident from the first part of my blog but that ends here. But as a person who identifies herself with scientific community, I am more or less going to blog about what I learnt from my course and my personal beliefs and ideas.

Wikipedia defines Metagenomics as study of  "metagenomes, genetic material recovered directly from environmental samples" (as copy and pasted!). I pictured this as a scenario where a traditional microbiologist got us from his laminar airflow hood and pulled up his sleeves and said to himself you know what we have advanced way too much in technology so why not use that to study these little guys in concert with their community, from their natural habitat. In other words there may be lot of potential in them in their natural conditions which could be discovered and applied.

In other words through centuries we have found hundred of new organisms, cultured, studied, characterized, applied and did a whole bunch of stuff with them, now we are in the 21st century, we need to think out of the box. All this time we were studying microbes in conditions created by us, but in reality the environment is no where similar to our traditional laboratory and it would mean that we would totally miss out on all those microbes which we cannot culture.16sRNA was great to classify these guys and derive phylogentic relationships, since we came to know that there are many missing pieces of the puzzle and this was due to the fact we were zooming in on microbes which we could culture.
We use traditional molecular biology, microbiology and bioinformatics knowledge and principles to explore this field. We find all those genes that nature has given these organism to may be adapt to it's environement and use them to improve the world. There is a lot to be explore here and hopefully we will find our answer and once we do that it could translate to clean eneregy in the form of biofuels, cleaning up spills and toxics in environment through bioremediation and helps in many more ways.

Will keep updating more and more as I get time.





1 comment:

  1. Sounds cool and interesting...Look for more updates. Way to go washu...

    ReplyDelete