Current culture-independent methodologies. (A) In metagenomics, the entire DNA of an environmental community is sequenced. Assembled contigs are binned into metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs). (B) In single-cell genomics (SCGs), individual cells are isolated, sequenced, and analyzed. Because of little DNA content per cell, whole-genome amplification (WGA) is required. (C) In mini-metagenomics, typically pools of five to 1000 cells are sortied and sequenced. Although complexity is lower than for standard metagenomics, binning is still required, and the low DNA content of small cell pools still necessitates WGA. Created with BioRender (https://www.biorender.com).