Lost, A Brief Intro

Soil is the most useful and valuable habitat in the Earth’s biosphere. Most of the enzymes and antibiotics of most common use in industrial applications have been isolated from cultured soil microbes. Recent studies have demonstrated that one gram of soil may contain up to 4,000 different species which from only 1% of this is readily cultivable. This demonstrates that soil is indeed a rich source for isolation of novel genes with a plausible wide range of biotechnology applications.

All the biological active molecules such as restriction enzymes, antibiotics, metabolic enzymes, catalytic enzymes discovered until now had been isolated from pure cultures of organism. These organisms only represent the 1% of the microbial community that is known to exist, leaving us with the query of knowing what lies beneath the 99% of the uncultivable organism. This 99% of the non-cultivable organisms can be access by the use of Metagenomics in the construction of Metagenomics Libraries.

Metagenomics is based on the genomic analysis of microbial DNA that is extracted directly from communities in environmental samples. The complete process can be described as following according to Handelsman et al. (1998): Isolation of metagenomic DNA directly from soil, with gentle methods to preserve large pieces of DNA, cutting the DNA with restriction enzymes, and clonation of it in pieces into a readily cultured organism such as Escherichia coli. This method has been already employ by various scientist around the world and has been very fructiferous.

Soil Metagenomics has provided already some interesting results. There has been some characterization of clones conferring indirubin and indigo production and clones secreting the antibiotics turbomycin A and B. This demonstrates that in fact Metagenomics is a real procedure, which produces real results. Metagenomic Libraries has been an independent cultivable technique for approaching the uncultivable organisms, not only in soil but also in may habitats, used in many laboratories around the world for the isolation of novel biomolecules.

In our case, metagenomics provides a method to isolate novel antifungal molecules without the necessity of having the pure organism in a plate, which sometimes can be an impossible task at the moment.