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In order to describe a novel uncultured viral species, it is essential to obtain the DNA sequence of their full genomes. The ability to distinguish the viral genome from the genome of its bacterial host is the major challenge of the modern viromics. The major obstacles for mining of viral genomes in metagenomic assemblies is bacterial contamination in viromes and low DNA input for sequencing.These obstacles can be overcome by flow cytometry that allows collecting free viral particles from environmental samples. In addition, fluorescence activated cell sorting reduces the bacterial contamination. By using optimized sequencing protocols, the ultra-low input DNA samples can be sequenced directly, without the need for whole genome amplification. This chapter provides details for staining of environmental viruses, flow cytometry, and direct sequencing of ultra-low input DNA samples on Illumina platform.

The large amount of DNA needed to prepare a library in next generation sequencing protocols hinders direct sequencing of small DNA samples. This limitation is usually overcome by the enrichment of such samples with whole genome amplification (WGA), mostly by multiple displacement amplification (MDA) based on φ29 polymerase. However, this technique can be biased by the GC content of the sample and is prone to the development of chimeras as well as contamination during enrichment, which contributes to undesired noise during sequence data analysis, and also hampers the proper functional and/or taxonomic assignments. An alternative to MDA is direct DNA sequencing (DS), which represents the theoretical gold standard in genome sequencing. In this work, we explore the possibility of sequencing the genome of Escherichia coli fs 24 from the minimum number of DNA molecules required for pyrosequencing, according to the notion of one-bead-one-molecule. Using an optimized protocol for DS, we constructed a shotgun library containing the minimum number of DNA molecules needed to fill a selected region of a picotiterplate. We gathered most of the reference genome extension with uniform coverage. We compared the DS method with MDA applied to the same amount of starting DNA. As expected, MDA yielded a sparse and biased read distribution, with a very high amount of unassigned and unspecific DNA amplifications. The optimized DS protocol allows unbiased sequencing to be performed from samples with a very small amount of DNA.

Natural environments represent an incredible source of microbial genetic diversity. Discovery of novel biomolecules involves biotechnological methods that often require the design and implementation of biochemical assays to screen clone libraries. However, when an assay is applied to thousands of clones, one may eventually end up with very few positive clones which, in most of the cases, have to be "domesticated" for downstream characterization and application, and this makes screening both laborious and expensive. The negative clones, which are not considered by the selected assay, may also have biotechnological potential; however, unfortunately they would remain unexplored. Knowledge of the clone sequences provides important clues about potential biotechnological application of the clones in the library; however, the sequencing of clones one-by-one would be very time-consuming and expensive. In this study, we characterized the first metagenomic clone library from the feces of a healthy human volunteer, using a method based on 454 pyrosequencing coupled with a clone-by-clone Sanger end-sequencing. Instead of whole individual clone sequencing, we sequenced 358 clones in a pool. The medium-large insert (7-15 kb) cloning strategy allowed us to assemble these clones correctly, and to assign the clone ends to maintain the link between the position of a living clone in the library and the annotated contig from the 454 assembly. Finally, we found several open reading frames (ORFs) with previously described potential medical application. The proposed approach allows planning ad-hoc biochemical assays for the clones of interest, and the appropriate sub-cloning strategy for gene expression in suitable vectors/hosts.