Complete genome from a single cell - well, yes, *technically*

Its not quite marine science (hey, its my blog, so nerrr), but there's a paper in PLoS One this week where the authors describe the assembly of a genome sequence (all the DNA from beginning to end) from a single cell of a bacterium.  Normally it would take a whole bunch of cultured cells to do this, which limits genome sequencing to those bacteria that can be cultured and right now that isn't many (probably less than 10%).

Having announced this great achievement (and it is) in their abstract, the authors go on to point out that this particular bacterium, a symbiont from the gut of an insect, is polyploid.  In other words, it has multiple copies of the whole genome per cell - in fact, up to 900 copies!  So, while its technically correct that they sequenced a genome based on a single cell, you'll forgive me for thinking they're gilding the lily a bit.

While we're at it, who is proofing manuscripts at PLoS One these days?  The last sentence of the abstract reads: "This study demonstrates the power of single cell genomics to generate a complete, high quality, non-composite reference genome within an environmental sample, which can be used for population genetic analyzes."  Huh?

Woyke, T., Tighe, D., Mavromatis, K., Clum, A., Copeland, A., Schackwitz, W., Lapidus, A., Wu, D., McCutcheon, J., McDonald, B., Moran, N., Bristow, J., & Cheng, J. (2010). One Bacterial Cell, One Complete Genome PLoS ONE, 5 (4) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0010314