Diseases are an important factor that endangers agricultural harvests, and they can spread to varying degrees, thereby expanding losses. Therefore, rapid and accurate identification of pathogens is a necessary condition for discovering and adopting appropriate disaster reduction strategies. In traditional research, pathogens are identified based on disease symptoms or crop morphology, and many specific intracellular pathogens cannot grow in pure culture or form reproductive structures, making their detection and identification very difficult.
The emergence of high-throughput technology enables the simultaneous identification of thousands of taxonomic units in each sample from hundreds of samples, and facilitates the simultaneous study of any organism and virus group. Common methods include the detection and identification of pathogens using metagenomes and metatranscriptomies, as well as the exploration of the response mechanism of host species under disease conditions using bulk RNA seq technology.
The emergence of single-cell technology has pushed the application of high-throughput omics in the field of agricultural disease prevention and control research to a new and more precise level.
As is well known, the relationship between microorganisms and agriculture is very close. In soil, known as the "microbial stronghold", microorganisms play a major role in circulation and play an irreplaceable role. They decompose the residual waste of animals and plants and convert it into humus, promoting the formation of a good soil structure. Many soil microorganisms can fix nitrogen in the air and transform various organic matter, continuously providing plants with carbon that can be effectively utilized Various nutrients such as nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, sulfur, etc., as well as pathogenic microorganisms of insects and antagonistic microorganisms of plant pathogens, are widely present in nature. They can partially replace chemical pesticides through the prevention and control of plant diseases and pests. In addition, through microbial reproduction and fermentation, various products such as organic acids, amino acids, growth hormones, antibiotics, and various enzyme preparations can be produced, which can be used as feed additives, food additives, and pesticides respectively. Their applications are becoming increasingly widespread. However, although the agricultural microbial resources on Earth are extremely abundant, humans have a long history of utilizing them, The traditional conventional microbial technology mainly involves screening various natural microbial strains and utilizing them, which not only has low efficiency, long cycle, and high cost. Moreover, the selected strains often have various defects and deficiencies, which limit their widespread application。
At present, single-cell whole genome amplification and sequencing have been increasingly used to study new microorganisms or genes that have not been detected by metagenomics or other conventional technologies, as well as to discover microorganisms with low abundance in the environment that are difficult to purify and cultivate, and to study the evolution process of microbial cell life. With the continuous progress of materials science and high-throughput sequencing technology, single-cell microbial whole genome amplification technology has gradually entered the field of micro volume and high throughput, and is gradually developing towards single cell sorting, cell lysis, whole genome amplification, and high-throughput sequencing integration. I believe that new technologies for analyzing the entire genome of a single cell of microorganisms with greater precision and speed will continue to be developed.
