One-Cell Metabolic Phenotyping and Sequencing of Soil Microbiome by Raman-Activated Gravity-Driven Encapsulation (RAGE)
Xiaoyan Jing, Yanhai Gong, Teng Xu, Yu Meng, Xiao Han, Xiaolu Su, Jianmei Wang, Yuetong Ji, Yuandong Li, Zhongjun Jia, Bo Ma, Jian Xu
Abstract
metabolic activities drive many natural processes of pivotal ecological significance or underlie industrial production of numerous valuable bioactivities. However, pinpointing "who is doing what" in a soil microbiome, which consists of mainly yet-to-be-cultured species, has remained a major challenge. Here, for soil microbiota, we established a Raman-activated gravity-driven single-cell encapsulation and sequencing (RAGE-Seq) method, which identifies, sorts, and sequences at the resolution of precisely one microbial cell via its catabolic and anabolic functions. As a Raman-activated cell sorter (RACS) family member that can establish a metabolism-genome link at one-cell resolution from soil, RAGE-Seq can help to precisely pinpoint "who is doing what" in complex ecosystems.