Maths on microbes: adding microbial ecophysiology to metagenomics

Maths on microbes: adding microbial ecophysiology to metagenomics

Microbial ecology has shifted in the last 30 years from a field strongly depending on culturing and microscopy to a discipline dominated by cultivation-independent molecular analysis. Nowadays, metagenomics (for simplicity, I include in metagenomics also high-throughput sequencing of phylogenetic and functional marker genes) allows unprecedented insight into the composition and functional poten...

Metagenomics--the key to the uncultured microbes.

It is widely accepted that up to 99.8% of the microbes present in many environments are not readily culturable. 'Metagenome technology' tries to overcome this bottleneck by developing and using culture-independent approaches. From the outset, metagenome-based approaches have led to the accumulation of an increasing number of DNA sequences, but until this time the sequences retrieved have been t...

Microbes and Metagenomics in Human Health

Ocean microbial metagenomics

Technology for accessing the genomic DNA of microorganisms, directly from environmental samples without prior cultivation, has opened new vistas to understanding microbial diversity and functions. Especially as applied to soils and the oceans, environments on Earth where microbial diversity is vast, metagenomics and its emergent approaches have the power to transform rapidly our understanding o...

Metagenomics: Inferring Microbial Function

Background: The number of prokaryotic genome sequences becoming available is growing steadily and is growing faster than our ability to accurately annotate them. Description: We describe a fully automated service for annotating bacterial and archaeal genomes. The service identifies protein-encoding, rRNA and tRNA genes, assigns functions to the genes, predicts which subsystems are represented i...