Metagenomic Analysis of a Blood Stain from French Revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat
Metagenomics is the biological equivalent of suddenly being able to see dark matter.<p>Normally, if you want to analyze a microbe, you do it by culturing the organism in Petri dishes.  By varying the growth medium you can find out a lot about your organism: what it eats, if it breathes, how it metabolizes various things.  The problem is that only 5-10% of bacteria grow on plates. Microbiologists call this the &quot;plate count anomaly&quot; and what it means is this: your sample in a microscope could be teeming with life, but if you plate it you&#x27;ll probably get this homogeneous little sample of not very many organisms.  The rest are called &quot;microbial dark matter.&quot;<p>With metagenomics, we could see them all.  It made people a little funny in the head.  You might remember that &quot;The Microbiome&quot; was a big idea in the media for a while.  It got pretty flattering treatment, considering what it is: a mass of mostly proto-shit floating around inside your colon.  But the enthusiasm wasn&#x27;t too far misplaced, because a major area of biology is growing by leaps and bounds now.<p>If you are a computer programmer considering a career change you should really take a day off to look into the new genetic technologies on offer.  Performance is doubling every year [1].  The world is changing.  And computing is at the center of it, both practically (all that research generates a lot of data) and conceptually (because gene expression is information processing).  So give it a look.<p>[1] Remember that?  <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Moore's_law" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Moore's_law</a>