Analysis of Lake Washington microbes shows the power of metagenomic approaches
Sunday, August 17, 2008 - 12:49
in Biology & Nature
Today's powerful sequencing machines can rapidly read the genomes of entire communities of microbes, but the challenge is to extract meaningful information from the jumbled reams of data. In a paper appearing in Nature Biotechnology August 17, a collaboration headed by researchers at the University of Washington and the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (DOE JGI) describes a novel approach for extracting single genomes and discerning specific microbial capabilities from mixed community ("metagenomic") sequence data.