Working group (Aleš Horák)

The majority of Earth’s biodiversity is microscopic and cannot be kept in permanent cultures. However, our knowledge of life is based on extensive exploitation of few either macroscopic (Arabidopsis, Oryza, Drosophila, Caenorhabditis, rat or Xenopus…) or cultivable unicellular (Saccharomyces, Neurospora, Chlamydomonas…) models representing only a small fraction of true diversity. Laboratory of environmental genomics was founded in March 2013 and its main goal is to characterize diversity, ecological role and metabolic potential of important/interesting unicellular eukaryotes not available from cultures using the power of the next-generation sequencing and bioinformatics.