[Progress in microbial single-cell genomics for environmental microbiology research - A review]

We compared different methods used in single-cell isolation and whole genome amplification of microbial cells, and summarized research progresses in single-cell genomics (SCG) in studying environmental microbes. The studies of single cell and SCG have become one of the hot topics in life sciences in recent years. As a newly developed technology following microbial metagenomics, microbial SCG can efficiently explore large amounts of information of the uncultivable microbial genomics from environment. Generally, following steps need to be taken to obtain microbial SCG:isolation of single microbial cells, whole genome amplification of the single cells, amplicon sequencing, and data analysis. Microbial SCG can be widely used to explore new functional genes that are not detectable by metagenomics and other traditional methods, detect uncultured microbes with extremely low abundance, and study the life evolution of microbial cells.