The Road to Metagenomics: From Microbiology to DNA Sequencing Technologies and Bioinformatics
Metagenomics can be defined as the study of the metagenome, which is collective genome of microorganisms. The microorganisms are collected from an environmental samples and the studies are conducted to provide information on the microbial diversity and ecology of a specific environment.
Metagenomics - The Era of Next Generation Sequencing
The study of microorganism is conducted through the shotgun metagenomics technology/ technique which is used to extract the DNA from the environmental sample and sequence the small fragments. The metagenomic is the rising and vibrant field that has appropriated the tools used for standard genomics and applied for the study of the entire communities of microbes. This requires no need to isolate and culture the individual microbial species.
Bioinformatics
The data generated by metagenomics experiments are both enormous and inherently noisy, containing fragmented data representing as many as 10,000 species. The sequencing of the cow rumen metagenome generated 279 gigabases, or 279 billion base pairs of nucleotide sequence data, while the human gut microbiome gene catalog identified 3.3 million genes assembled from 567.7 gigabases of sequence data.
Collecting, curating, and extracting useful biological information from datasets of this size represent significant computational challenges for researchers.
Antibiotics
Antibiotics and enzymes are among the discoveries from metagenomics. The discovery of streptomycin, turbomycin sprang from basic studies of the soil microbiome. Functional metagenomics serves to find novel antibiotics or novel antibiotic resistance genes, and descriptive metagenomics serves to analyze changes in the composition of the microbiome and to track the presence and abundance of known antibiotic resistance genes in different environments.
Sequence pre-filtering
The first step of metagenomic data analysis requires the execution of certain pre-filtering steps, including the removal of redundant, low-quality sequences and sequences of probable eukaryotic origin (especially in metagenomes of human origin). The methods available for the removal of contaminating eukaryotic genomic DNA sequences include Eu-Detect and DeConseq.
Biotechnology
Microbial communities produce a vast array of biologically active chemicals that are used in competition and communication. Many of the drugs in use today were originally uncovered in microbes; recent progress in mining the rich genetic resource of non-culturable microbes has led to the discovery of new genes, enzymes, and natural products. The application of metagenomics has allowed the development of commodity and fine chemicals, agrochemicals and pharmaceuticals where the benefit of enzyme-catalyzed chiral synthesis is increasingly recognized.
source: Wikipedia