Acquisition of genome information from single-celled unculturable organisms (radiolaria) by exploiting genome profiling (GP)

BACKGROUND: There is no effective method to obtain genome information from single-celled unculturable organisms such as radiolarians. Even worse, such organisms are often very difficult to collect. Sequence analysis of 18S rDNA has been carried out, but obtaining the data has been difficult and it has provided a rather limited amount of genome information. In this paper, we have developed a method which provides a sufficient amount of data from an unculturable organism. The effectiveness of this method was demonstrated by applying it to the provisional classification of a set of unculturable organisms (radiolarians). RESULTS: Dendrogram was drawn regarding the single-celled unculturable species based on the similarity score termed PaSS, offering a consistent result with the conventional taxonomy of them built up based on phenotypes. This fact has shown that genome profiling-based technology developed here can obtain genome information being sufficient for identifying and classifying species from a single-celled organism. CONCLUSION: Since this method is so simple, general, and yet powerful, it can be applied to various organisms and cells, especially single-celled, uncluturable ones, for their genome analysis.