It has proven difficult to figure out the genome of many of the microorganisms in the ocean because they are much less abundant than other, well-known species. This makes it difficult to isolate them and culture them, creating a chicken and egg problem: how do you study them if you can’t grow them, but to grow them you need to know a bit more about them. Just published in Science magazine, researchers from the School of Oceanography have created a way to isolate genomes of microorganisms that may make up less than 7% of a sample, using metagenomics. Vaughn Iverson, Virginia E. Armbrust and others discuss in this UW News article.  Here is the original (registration required).