This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology for FY 2008. The fellowship supports a research and training plan entitled "Surveying intact microbial communities using binary hybridization fingerprints" for Mitchell D. Day. The host institutions for this research are University of Idaho and the National Institute of Genetics in Mishima, Japan, and the sponsoring scientists are Dr. James Foster and Dr. Takashi Gojobori, respectively.
Currently sequencing the genomes of individual microorganisms can be done quickly; but it is hard to describe complex communities using the same methods used for solitary genomes. A microbial genome may be 4 million base pairs long, but a pinch of soil may contain 10,000 billion base pairs of unique sequence. This research is using next-generation sequencing technology to understand the metagenome, the collected genomic information in a microbial community by obtaining a binary fingerprint of millions of long DNA fragments extracted directly from an intact community. This fingerprint can be correlated with existing sequences found in databases. This approach gives a broad sampling by exchanging detail at the base-pair level for a global picture of the entire metagenome.
Training objectives include expanding proficiencies in the fields of computational biology, bioinformatics, and mentorship. This research will have an impact in the general understanding of microbial communities and contribute data to metagenomic databases available to the public.
