For every known star in our universe, there are billions of microbes here on Earth. But scientists are unable to culture most of these species in the lab. One approach to getting to know these beguiling bugs is to look at the big picture of their community. Metagenomics aims to characterize the overall genomic profile of thousands of species of microorganisms at the same time.
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| Rob Knight at the 2011 DOE JGI User Meeting. In a recent Nature Biotechnology paper, he and his colleagues propose policy changes to move the field of metagenomics forward. |
But this field that depends on sequencing massive amounts is fraught with challenges: limited data on the identity of genes, more organisms in a microbial community than some expect, a lack of experimental and analytical standards, and other problems.
In a paper published online June 7, 2012 in Nature Biotechnology, DOE JGI researchers and their collaborators reinforce the need for a uniform set of standards as well and multiple sampling replicates to bolster the rigor of these studies. They explained how these goals are exemplified in the Earth Microbiome Project (EMP), an enormous cross-collaborative effort involving DOE JGI and sequencing the metagenomes of more than 200,000 worldwide samples. They hope that EMP’s standard operating procedures and open-access framework will serve as a model for future large-scale interdisciplinary initiatives.