The better environmental genomics

EN: Environmental Microbiology asked nine specialists of the field to have a view into the crystal ball [1]. Single-cell genomics was mentioned more than once. I hope the authors are right and this technology will be used for more environmental sequencing projects in the future. The combination of microfluid separation systems (or other similar technologies) and single-cell sequencing is a much clearer approach than the sequencing of randomly selected sequences like usually done in metagenomics. Knowing that sequences coming from the same or a different organism is helpful information in the data analysis. The (automatic) selection of cells before sequencing could solve the problem that usually only dominating species can be analyzed effectively. I am crossing fingers for more appealing datasets.

[1] Environmental Microbiology, 2007 Jan, 9(1), 1-11