Credit: Janey Lee
The JGI team involved in the study included (left to right): Frederik Schulz, Tanja Woyke, Rex Malmstrom and Danielle Goudeau (sitting). With a myriad of microbial cells in a single gram of soil, JGI researchers aimed to reduce the complexity by flow-sorting microbes into several of small pools of only 100 cells each before sequencing these pools separately. When the data from this "mini-metagenomics" approach was analyzed, 15 novel giant virus genomes were uncovered.