Single cell genomics gets its own Center at the Bigelow Lab

Just got this email announcement:

Dear colleagues,

We are pleased to announce the establishment of the Single Cell Genomics Center (SCGC) at the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences. The goal of SCGC is to make single cell genomics more accessible to the broad scientific community and to serve as an engine of discoveries in the areas of microbial ecology, evolution, and bioprospecting. The SCGC works as a shared user facility, available to scientists at Bigelow and other institutions, with user fees charged to cover SCGC operational costs. For more information, please see our website:

http://www.bigelow.org/research/facilities/single_cell_genomics_center/

We also want to draw your attention to the upcoming second Microbial Single Cell Genomics Workshop, scheduled for September 19-24, 2010:

http://www.bigelow.org/research/facilities/single_cell_genomics_center/workshop2010

With best regards,

Ramunas Stepanauskas and Michael Sieracki 

Single cell genomics is clearly moving up in the world and this is further proof -- a whole core facility dedicated to providing single cell genomics to the world.  I note, I have collaborated with Ramunas and others on a recent PLoS One paper on single cell genomics (see Woyke T, Xie G, Copeland A, González JM, Han C, et al. (2009) Assembling the Marine Metagenome, One Cell at a Time. PLoS ONE 4(4): e5299. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0005299). 


Basically the idea is, that sequencing and/or characterizing the genomic content of single cells is going to be a powerful tool in many areas of biology research ... including studies of microbial communities, interpreting metagenomic data, studies of mutation processes, population genetics, etc ...