title: Deciphering diversity and ecological function from marine metagenomes.
abstract: Metagenomic sequencing now represents a common, powerful approach for investigating diversity and functional relationships in marine ecosystems. High-throughput datasets generated from random fragments of environmental DNA can provide a less biased view of organismal abundance (versus PCR-based amplicon sequencing) and enable novel exploration of microbial genomes by recovering genome assemblies from uncultured species, identifying ecological functions, and reconstructing metabolic pathways. This review highlights the current state of knowledge in marine metagenomics, focusing on biological insights gained from recent environmental studies and detailing commonly employed methods for data collection and analysis.
authors.affiliation: UC Davis Genome Center, University of California-Davis, One Shields Ave, Davis, California 95616 holly.bik@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Holly M
authors.initials: HM
authors.lastname: Bik
mesh_terms: D059001:Aquatic Organisms / Q000235:genetics*; D044822:Biodiversity; D019295:Computational Biology / Q000639:trends; D017753:Ecosystem; D054892:Metagenome / Q000235:genetics*; D059392:Petroleum Pollution; D012106:Research / Q000639:trends; D014780:Viruses / Q000235:genetics