The oceans are full of bacteria. Outwardly, they all look much the same, but there are many
different species living a variety of ways of life. This has led Hanno Teeling, Bernhard Fuchs and
Frank Oliver Glöckner from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen to
analyze bacterial diversity in the oceans with the aid of metagenomics. To do this, they first
throw the whole bacterial genome into one pot, then decode the DNA molecules and sort the
genetic mix back into individual bacterial groups.