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...energy, resisting antibiotics, or causing disease. What is meant by the statement that metagenomics reveals ‘who is there and what they do’? Metagenomics is the study of all genetic material found in an environmental sample. It tells us ‘who is there’ by identifying the organisms present based on their DNA or RNA, and ‘what they do’ by analysing the genes they...

...energy. It may be a bit perplexing that the same word has such different meanings, and some authors do prefer to use different words. However, in this unit we have decided to stick to one term only, because it is normally quite easy to understand what it refers to from the context in which it appears. The remainder of this unit is a short introduction to the phenomenon of...

...energy from chemical reactions made possible by the discharge of hot chemically enriched fluids through vents on the floor of an ocean capped by a thick layer of ice. Note that 'ice' does not necessarily mean just frozen water. In the outer Solar System, although H2O is usually the dominant component, ice can incorporate other frozen volatiles such as NH3, CO2, CO, CH4...