Biotechnology Bulletin ›› 2015, Vol. 31 ›› Issue (11): 51-59.doi: 10.13560/j.cnki.biotech.bull.1985.2015.11.001

• Review • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Progress in the Study of Environmental Microbes by Metagenomic Methods

Liu Jiemeng1,2, Qi Ji1   

  1. 1. State Key Laboratory of Genetic Engineering,School of Life Sciences,Fudan University,Shanghai 200433;2. The T-Life Research Center,Department of Physics,Fudan University,Shanghai 200433
  • Received:2015-07-21 Online:2015-11-26 Published:2015-11-26

Abstract: With the development of Next Generation Sequencing Technology(NGS), metagenomics has become a significant strategy to understand the structures of environmental microbial community and their interactions. Metagenomics analyzes the environmental microbes as a whole rather than extracting the individuals for culture and thus it can avoid the troubles of conventional culturing progress and bypass the accompanying difficulties. Due to this advantage, several sequencing projects of environmental microbes on human, ocean, soil etc. have been launched and largely promoted the progress on metagenomic studies. In this review, we will discuss both the merits and restrictions of current methods and pipelines adopted in the analysis on metagenomic data and introduce the progress brought by their applications in the researches of various environmental samples.

Key words: metagenomics, high-throughput sequencing, bioinformatics, environmental microbe