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• Kennedy, J
• Flemer, B
• Jackson, S
• Lejon, D
• Morrissey, J
• O’Gara, F
• Dobson, A
• [+] on Google Scholar
• Kennedy, J
• Flemer, B
• Jackson, S
• Lejon, D
• Morrissey, J
• O’Gara, F
• Dobson, A
• [+] on PubMed
• Kennedy, J
• Flemer, B
• Jackson, S
• Lejon, D
• Morrissey, J
• O’Gara, F
• Dobson, A

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Mar. Drugs 2010, 8(3), 608-628; doi:10.3390/md8030608

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Marine Metagenomics: New Tools for the Study and Exploitation of Marine Microbial Metabolism

Jonathan Kennedy ¹ , Burkhardt Flemer ¹ , Stephen A. Jackson ¹ , David P. H. Lejon ¹ , John P. Morrissey ^1,2 , Fergal O’Gara ^1,2,3  and Alan D. W. Dobson ^1,2,*

¹ Marine Biotechnology Centre, Environmental Research Institute, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland ² Department of Microbiology, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland ³ BIOMERIT Research Centre, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland

* Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.

Received: 20 January 2010; in revised form: 4 February 2010 / Accepted: 12 March 2010 / Published: 15 March 2010

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Enzymes from the Sea: Sources, Molecular Biology and Bioprocesses)

Download PDF Full-Text [608 KB, uploaded 15 March 2010 10:35 CET]

Abstract: The marine environment is extremely diverse, with huge variations in pressure and temperature. Nevertheless, life, especially microbial life, thrives throughout the marine biosphere and microbes have adapted to all the divergent environments present. Large scale DNA sequence based approaches have recently been used to investigate the marine environment and these studies have revealed that the oceans harbor unprecedented microbial diversity. Novel gene families with representatives only within such metagenomic datasets represent a large proportion of the ocean metagenome. The presence of so many new gene families from these uncultured and highly diverse microbial populations represents a challenge for the understanding of and exploitation of the biology and biochemistry of the ocean environment. The application of new metagenomic and single cell genomics tools offers new ways to explore the complete metabolic diversity of the marine biome.

Keywords: metagenome; marine; microorganism; enzyme

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