It has been predicted that Earth may be home to as many as one trillion (10¹²) microbial species, of which 99.999% remain to be discovered.¹ The discovery of new micro-organisms is not only important for the prediction of biodiversity and ecological studies, but also for the search of valuable products from
nature — known as “bioprospecting”. Discovery and functional metagenomics from complex environmental samples have traditionally been hampered by the fact that many microbes are unculturable or present in very low abundance, and the reliance of data analysis methods on annotated reference genomes.

The ProxiMeta^™ Metagenome Deconvolution Platform is designed for discovery and bioprospecting, as it does not require culturing or rely on any a priori data. With the ability to assemble high-quality genomes for microbes with as little as 0.05% cellular abundance in a sample, it is easy to discover novel organisms, strains and genes, and predict gene function.

Learn how the ProxiMeta Platform was used to:

• identify three novel bacterial species in a landfill microbial community, and predict enzymes and comprehensive metabolic pathways for polyurethane biodegradation.
• discover hundreds of previously unsequenced bacterial and archaeal genomes from Scottish cattle rumen samples, and predict over 69,000 genes involved in biomass degradation.
• characterize a novel, interspecific hybrid yeast and discover a novel Acetobacter species in a spontaneously inoculated beer sample.
• discover fourteen novel bacterial genomes from a single human fecal sample.
• identify putative pathogenicity, virulence, quorum sensing and mobility genes in Vampirovibrio chlorellavorus, a pathogen of Chlorella species used for producing harvestable biomass for biofuels or bioproducts.