Scientists
have untangled a soil metagenome -- all the genetic material recovered from a
sample of soil -- more fully than ever before, reconstructing portions of the
genomes of 129 species of microbes. While it's only a tiny proportion of the
estimated 100,000 species in the sample, it's a leap forward for scientists who
have had only a fraction of that success to date.
The sample under scrutiny included more than 250
billion base pairs of genetic data, mostly of microbes, which awaited a
scientific team with the chutzpah to try to make sense of it. Jansson's team
took on the challenge, unraveling an amount of information approximately equal
to all the data streaming through 200 cell phones in a month.
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