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Is the future of metagenomics, genomics?
Author(s) -
Hugenholtz Philip
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
the faseb journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.709
H-Index - 277
eISSN - 1530-6860
pISSN - 0892-6638
DOI - 10.1096/fasebj.24.1_supplement.199.2
Subject(s) - metagenomics , bottleneck , genomics , biology , genome , computational biology , comparative genomics , tree of life (biology) , evolutionary biology , computer science , genetics , phylogenetics , gene , embedded system
Metagenomics, the application of high throughput sequencing to environmental samples, has the great advantage over genomics that it bypasses the cultivation bottleneck and provides access to the largely unexplored microbial world. On the downside, metagenomes are usually aggregates of numerous microbial genomes that need to be informatically separated to facilitate analysis. Moreover, most members of a microbial community are not sampled sufficiently to produce even low‐quality draft genomes. An alternative approach to analyzing communities without the need for cultivation is flow sorting constituent members and obtaining genomic data from sorted cells or populations. Although this is not a new approach, several recent advances have brought us to the point where it may be possible to sort and sequence representatives of most dominant populations (>0.5%) in a given community, essentially turning comparative metagenomics into comparative genomics. An additional benefit of this approach is the potential to obtain a phylogenetically‐balanced genomic representation of the microbial tree of life.