With rapid genome sequencing, “we are able to look at the master blueprint of a microbe,” Dr. Relman said in a telephone interview. It is “like being given the operating manual for your car after you have been trying to trouble-shoot a problem with it for some time.”

Dr. Matthew K. Waldor of Harvard Medical School said the new technology “is changing all aspects of microbiology — it’s just transformative.”

One group is starting to develop what it calls disease weather maps. The idea is to get swabs or samples from sewage treatment plants or places like subways or hospitals and quickly sequence the genomes of all the micro-organisms. That will tell them exactly what bacteria and viruses are present and how prevalent they are.

With those tools, investigators can create a kind of weather map of disease patterns. And they can take precautions against ones that are starting to emerge — flu or food-borne diseases or SARS, for example, or antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria in a hospital.

Others are sequencing bacterial genomes to find where diseases originated. To study the Black Death, which swept Europe in the 14th century, researchers compared genomes of today’s bubonic plague bacteria, which are slightly different in different countries. Working backward, they were able to create a family tree that placed the microbe’s origin in China, 2,600 to 2,800 years ago.

Still others, including Dr. Relman, are examining the vast sea of micro-organisms that live peacefully on and in the human body. He finds, for example, that the bacteria in saliva are different from those on teeth and that the bacteria on one tooth are different from those on adjacent teeth. Those mouth bacteria, researchers say, hold clues to tooth decay and gum disease, two of the most common human infections.

A Real-World Test

For Dr. Musser and his colleagues, the real-world test of what they could do came on that June evening.