guest post from
Gijs van Rooijen Ph.D.
Chief Scientific Officer, Genome Alberta

A few days while at BIO09, Genome Alberta announced funding for a Genomics Project led out the University of Calgary by Dr Gerrit Voordouw called “Metagenomics for Greener Production of and Extraction of Hydrocarbon Energy”. 
This Project has been a long time coming and has special significance for me.  In 1988, I left the Netherlands, to work as part of a Student Exchange in a Petroleum Microbiology lab, that just happened to be the lab of Dr Gerrit Voordouw, a scientist I got to know in the Netherlands in the early eighties. My Student’s Research Project at the time was called “Cloning and Sequencing of Cytochrome C553 from Desulfovibrio vulgaris”. By all accounts this Student’s Project was successful and resulted in a scientific publication in a respected scientific journal. The main purpose of the research was to decode the genetic information of a single gene (about 1000 basepairs long) in an single organism that called the oil and gas environments “home”. 
Fast forward 20 years and we have a new project which proposes to characterize whole genomes of bacterial communities resulting in billions of basepairs of sequence information. This makes my achievement back in 1988 look miniscule but then we are living in a genomics era now, and have technology available today, we could only dream about in 1988.

Why should you care?
Well first of all let me “decode” the title of the Project. It sounds very intimidating, but it need not be. It simply refers to the identification and the genetic characterization of the microbes that live in environments from which we extract energy (such as oilsands or coal beds). It may surprise you to know that despite decades of research in this area, scientists know very little. This is mainly the result of the fact that these microbes are living in environments that are often difficult to duplicate in a laboratory environment. For instance, most microbes are obligate anaerobic, which simply means that they die when they are exposed to oxygen or air. In addition microbes often need other microbes to survive (more on this later). As a results scientists that have chosen to study these microbes, require specialized expertise and equipment to culture and study these organism in the lab. Before the genomic era (pre-1990), culturing microorganisms was required to obtain sufficient DNA (molecules that encode the genetic information) so that the DNA could be sequenced thereby unraveling the genetic composition of such an organism. As reference, my modest achievement in 1988 did not include the isolation of DNA from this organism. As a budding scientist I would have likely failed in that task!!!.
With the advent of genomics and the significant advances that have been made in instrumentation development, it is now possible to obtain sequence information using only a small number or even a single microbe, and therefore culturing these organisms may no longer be required in order to decode their DNA. This brings me to metagenomics or environmental genomics, the ability to decode the genetic information from a whole environment or community of microbes. Most microbes do live in communities, where they often need each other to survive (one microbe provides food and essential ingredients for the other). Through metagenomics we can find out exactly who lived in these hydrocarbon environment. Now you may ask “Well why is this important”. Such question is best answered with another questions such as “ If we had known that tailing ponds would produce methane as a result of the activity of a microbial community, would we still have designed them this way or would we have designed them in such a way that we could have captured the methane?
Results from this Genomics Project could have far reaching implication and teach us how to extract our finite hydrocarbon resources more efficiently and with less of an environmental footprint. I think we can all agree that this is a goal worth striving for……..