Metagenomics
The goal of metagenomics analysis is to investigate microbial communities by means of sequencing environmental samples. As a vast majority of microorganisms on Earth can not be cultured, metagenomics opens a view of a largely uncharted territory of different life forms, allowing a wide variety of applications in medicine, biotechnology and agriculture.
A typical metagenomics workflow follows these steps:
STEP 1
You have a research project for identifying novel enzyme candidates for some specific purpose, based on a microbial community (e.g. soil, human or animal gastrointestinal tract, sea water)
STEP 2
You conduct a pilot study to assess the diversity of the microbial community using 16S rDNA sequencing. Based on the sequence data we provide you with the report of the species composing the community, and a rarefaction analysis to estimate the sequence data needed for the experiment.
STEP 3
To identify novel enzyme candidates, you run a whole genome metagenomic sequencing on the environmental sample. We analyze the data to provide a quality report, sequence based filtering of the reads, and an assembly of the short-read data. We run gene prediction and statistical analysis to provide a list of candidate sequences.
STEP 4
On completion you get the list of candidates, but we can also provide the results as an interactive web based report, where you can do text or sequence search. You can also follow links to external databases related to the candidates.
STEP 5
You further investigate and validate the most promising candidates through laboratory experiments.