Resolving rare microbes and strain-level diversity by targeted metagenomic sequencing of phylogenetic marker genes
This project presents a novel targeted capture metagenomic sequencing approach designed to enable high-depth, high-resolution profiling of low-abundance prokaryotic taxa across the entire tree of life in a single experiment. While standard shotgun metagenomics is often dominated by abundant taxa, leaving the "rare biosphere" unexplored, our method leverages a custom capture panel targeting ten universally conserved, single-copy phylogenetic marker gene families.