title: Current opportunities and challenges in microbial metagenome analysis--a bioinformatic perspective.
abstract: Metagenomics has become an indispensable tool for studying the diversity and metabolic potential of environmental microbes, whose bulk is as yet non-cultivable. Continual progress in next-generation sequencing allows for generating increasingly large metagenomes and studying multiple metagenomes over time or space. Recently, a new type of holistic ecosystem study has emerged that seeks to combine metagenomics with biodiversity, meta-expression and contextual data. Such 'ecosystems biology' approaches bear the potential to not only advance our understanding of environmental microbes to a new level but also impose challenges due to increasing data complexities, in particular with respect to bioinformatic post-processing. This mini review aims to address selected opportunities and challenges of modern metagenomics from a bioinformatics perspective and hopefully will serve as a useful resource for microbial ecologists and bioinformaticians alike.
authors.affiliation: Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology, Bremen, Germany.
authors.forename: Hanno
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Teeling
authors.forename: Frank Oliver
authors.initials: FO
authors.lastname: Glöckner
mesh_terms: D044822:Biodiversity; D019295:Computational Biology; D020745:Genome, Archaeal; D016680:Genome, Bacterial; D054892:Metagenome; D056186:Metagenomics / Q000379:methods* / Q000639:trends*