MEGAHIT is a NGS de novo assembler for assembling large and complex metagenomics data in a time- and cost-efficient manner. It finished assembling a soil metagenomics dataset with 252 Gbps in 44.1 and 99.6 h on a single computing node with and without a graphics processing unit, respectively. MEGAHIT assembles the data as a whole, i.e. no pre-processing like partitioning and normalization was n...

†These authors have contributed equally to this work. The enormous potential in diversity of the marine life is still not fully exploited due to the difficulty in culturing many of the microorganisms under laboratory conditions. In this mini-review we underlined the importance of using an omics technique, such as metagenomics, to access the uncultured majority of microbial communities. We repor...

Hot springs have been investigated since the XIX century, but isolation and examination of their thermophilic microbial inhabitants did not start until the 1950s. Many thermophilic microorganisms and their viruses have since been discovered, although the real complexity of thermal communities was envisaged when research based on PCR amplification of the 16S rRNA genes arose. Thereafter, the pos...

Metagenomics is an emerging field focused on characterizing the structures, functions and dynamic operations of microbial communities sampled in their native habitats without the need for culture. Here, we present findings from a 16S rRNA gene sequence- and whole community DNA shotgun sequencing-based analysis of the adult human gut microbiomes of lean and obese mono- and dizygotic twins. Our f...

The recognition that most microorganisms in the environment cannot be cultured by standard methods stimulated the development of metagenomics, which is the genomic analysis of uncultured microorganisms. Two types of analysis have been used to obtain information from metagenomic libraries: a function-driven approach, in which metagenomic libraries are initially screened for an expressed trait, a...

Recent advances in accuracy and cost of whole-genome shotgun sequencing have opened up various fields of study for biologists. One such field is that of metagenomics – the study of the bacterial biome in a given sample. The human body, for example, has approximately 10 bacterial cells for every native cell, and lack of certain strains may contribute to prevalence of diseases such as obesity, Cr...