我们回顾一下宏基因组学快节奏领域的最新发展，并期待未来的商品

元基因组学一词首次出现在1998年的出版物中，根据维基百科。…是对宏基因组的研究，直接从环境样品中回收的遗传物质’，，，，and involves the sequencing of many individual microorganism genomes from those samples. This is in contrast to clonal (single, pure) microbial cultures which are commonly used for sequencing in microbial genomics and microbiology.

Metagenomics is an increasingly important area of research in genomics and other related fields. Diverse applications and new software developments continue to be made to improve the identification of mixed cultures of micro-organisms in both unusual and common environments. Much of the sequence data has been made publicly available.
已发布的数据集包括在Ebi主持；它具有“长期插入人类的粪便宏基因组库”和其目录中的“瘤瘤瘤瘤属分析”；人类微生物组项目 -HMP– which is hosted by the NIH and JGI’s extensive程序和档案。

新工具

伍德和萨尔茨伯格最近发表了一篇文章基因组生物学通过使用精确匹配来描述新的，改进的软件，用于序列分类：克莱肯。他们描述的超快且高度准确的程序’，，，，which shows a significant improvement in assigning taxonomic labels to metagenomic DNA sequences in contrast to previou,s specifically designed, programs that have tended to be slow. This taxonomic label assignment is very important as many metagenomic samples have a largely unknown content at the time of sequencing. The figure below reflects the sequence classification algorithm included in their article.

尽管基因组学领域的最新发展，但对病原体或病毒群落的描述越来越受到赞赏，因为这对于我们对生物体行为，疾病和相互作用的了解非常重要。最近出版BMC生物信息学，西蒙·鲁克斯（Simon Roux）和克莱蒙大学（ClermontUniversité）（法国）的同事描述了针对该领域工作的科学家的新分析工具。他们的网络服务器metavir 2：允许用户通过一组适应的工具探索和分析由原始读取或组装片段组成的病毒瘤（病毒元基因组）（Metavir是该软件的第一个版本的描述）。例如，下图显示了基于四核苷酸组成的16种未组装的人肠道病毒和组装数据集的比较。

在这个快速发展的领域中，新工具一直在开发，但是他们在做您想做的事情方面有多好？豪尔赫·瓦兹克斯（JorgeVázquez）Castellanos等。最近发表了一篇文章BMC基因组学在其中比较了使用模拟病毒 - 元素数据进行分析的一系列组装程序和分类注释软件的性能。他们解释说，大多数集会的成功受到了嵌合重叠的形成，这极大地阻碍了“…几乎是在任何分类学级别或功能上形成的，无论参数的严格性以及数据集中细菌起源的读数的存在如何。‘作者提出了一些在不同环境下进行最佳分析的特定工具。

New Applications

众所周知，微生物群落对人类健康很重要。这HMP项目试图'Generate microbiome taxonomic, metagenomic and functional data from clinical biospecimens obtained from a cohort(s) of carefully-phenotyped subjects with a specific disease or health state.' 和 '结合微生物组和主机数据以产生社区资源‘。这些社区也很重要ecology，生物燃料生产，农业和animal health。最近的简短报告Virology Journal经过Lu等。entitled ‘Genomic variation in macrophage-cultured European porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus Olot/91 revealed using ultra-deep next generation sequencing’ uses an ultra-deep sequencing methodology, without prior knowledge of the sequence, to construct the complete genome of a variant of an economically important livestock disease called PRRSV Olot/91. Describing how application of this methodology could be used to explore this disease further, the authors explain:

’可以成功检测到构成异质PRRSV种群的较小部分的罕见变体，以进一步探索微进化事件。’

New Challenges

Wommack及其同事used mock viral communities to examine the influence of pooling on population-scale analyses. Multiple displacement amplification (MDA) has been one of the most commonly used methods for amplifying genomic DNA from the environment and is effective at amplifying minute amounts of DNA. Reported biases, however, include preferential amplification of single stranded circular DNA and non-uniform amplification of linear genomes. The authors found that in pooled and single reaction multiple displacement amplification treatments, ‘sequence coverage of viral populations was highly variable and coverage patterns across viral genomes were nearly identical, indicating that initial priming biases were reproducible and that pooling did not alleviate biases’但是，对照未放大的序列文库显示噬菌体基因组的覆盖率相对均匀。

All these metagenomics examples are from publications in 2014. Looking back into 2013 provides us with an even more extensive variety of research on this subject, arising out of many varied biological contexts. Metagenomics remains an extraordinarily useful tool in furthering our understanding of (amongst others) human and animal health, ecology and economics. The articles below give a brief glimpse into the diversity of applications that this field is now investigating. We look forward to seeing what the rest of 2014 – and beyond – has in store.

其他一些最近的生物中央文章：
Coghlan ML等人：机场上的Metabarcododing Avian饮食：对鸟类危害管理计划的影响。研究遗传学2013, 4:27.link
Ross，E.M。等人：13个哺乳奶牛的瘤胃噬菌体的元基因组学。BMC微生物学2013，13：242。link
Berman HF和Rileylw：零售菠菜中微生物群的新型抗菌耐药基因的鉴定。BMC微生物学2013，13：272。link