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Published July 2005 | Published
Journal Article Open

Bioinformatics for Whole-Genome Shotgun Sequencing of Microbial Communities

Abstract

The application of whole-genome shotgun sequencing to microbial communities represents a major development in metagenomics, the study of uncultured microbes via the tools of modern genomic analysis. In the past year, whole-genome shotgun sequencing projects of prokaryotic communities from an acid mine biofilm, the Sargasso Sea, Minnesota farm soil, three deep-sea whale falls, and deep-sea sediments have been reported, adding to previously published work on viral communities from marine and fecal samples. The interpretation of this new kind of data poses a wide variety of exciting and difficult bioinformatics problems. The aim of this review is to introduce the bioinformatics community to this emerging field by surveying existing techniques and promising new approaches for several of the most interesting of these computational problems.

Additional Information

© 2005 Chen and Pachter. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Published: July 12, 2005. We thank Eric Allen, Jill Banfield, Susannah Tringe, and Gene Tyson for introducing us to the field of metagenomics and for helpful discussions while preparing the manuscript. We also thank Richard Karp and Satish Rao for useful discussions on bioinformatics issues, and the anonymous reviewers for their comments on an earlier version of this paper. Some of the data we have used were provided by JGI and EMBL. KC was supported by National Science Foundation (NSF) grant EF 03–31494. LP was supported by a Sloan Research Fellowship, NSF grant CCF 03–47992, and National Institutes of Health grant R01-HG02362–03.

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