New research shows how oceans can be used to help address major challenges such as the shortage of antimicrobial medicines, solutions for plastic pollution and novel enzymes for genome editing.
New research shows how oceans can be used to help address major challenges such as the shortage of antimicrobial medicines, solutions for plastic pollution and novel enzymes for genome editing.
In the past 20 years, scientists have greatly increased the number of microbial genomes they have collected from the ocean. However, using this information for biotechnology and medicine has been difficult.
For this new study, led by BGI Research in China in collaboration with the Shandong University, Xiamen University, the Ocean University of China (OUC), the University of Copenhagen (Denmark) and the University of East Anglia (UEA) in the UK, researchers analysed almost 43,200 genomes of micro-organisms (bacteria, archaea) from marine samples, uncovering a wide range of diversity with 138 distinct groups.
They provide new insights into how genome sizes evolve and, for example, how ocean microbes balance having CRISPR-Cas systems - part of their immune defense - with antibiotic resistance genes. Many of these genes are activated by antibiotics to help the microbes survive.
Read more at University of East Anglia
Photo Credit: Tiluria via Pixabay
