MaxBin: Automated sorting through metagenomes
Monday, September 29, 2014 - 15:52
in Biology & Nature
Microbes – the single-celled organisms that dominate every ecosystem on Earth - have an amazing ability to feed on plant biomass and convert it into other chemical products. Tapping into this talent has the potential to revolutionize energy, medicine, environmental remediation and many other fields. The success of this effort hinges in part on metagenomics, the emerging technology that enables researchers to read all the individual genomes of a sample microbial community at once. However, given that even a teaspoon of soil can contain billions of microbes, there is a great need to be able to cull the genomes of individual microbial species from a metagenomic sequence.