Metagenomics: preventing future pandemics

Beyond Ebola: lessons to mitigate future pandemics.

Preventing Pandemics Via International Development: A Systems Approach

Tiffany Bogich and colleagues find that breakdown or absence of public health infrastructure is most often the driver in pandemic outbreaks, whose prevention requires mainstream development funding rather than emergency funding.

Predictions for future human influenza pandemics.

Will there be another human influenza pandemic? The certainty is that there will be, and the probability is that the virus will emerge from Eurasian aquatic bird reservoirs and involve reassortment between a human and avian strain, with accumulation of mutations or true recombinational events (or both) that will permit spread and pathogenicity among humans. This process will probably occur in p...

Functional metagenomics: recent advances and future challenges.

Metagenomics is a relatively new but fast growing field within environmental biology directed at obtaining knowledge on genomes of environmental microbes as well as of entire microbial communities. With the sequencing technologies improving steadily, generating large amounts of sequence is becoming routine. However, it remains difficult to connect specific microbial phyla to specific functions ...

Current and future resources for functional metagenomics

Functional metagenomics is a powerful experimental approach for studying gene function, starting from the extracted DNA of mixed microbial populations. A functional approach relies on the construction and screening of metagenomic libraries-physical libraries that contain DNA cloned from environmental metagenomes. The information obtained from functional metagenomics can help in future annotatio...