Related Experiment Video
Updated: Aug 7, 2026

Next-generation Sequencing of 16S Ribosomal RNA Gene Amplicons
Published on: August 29, 2014
Bioinformatics for whole-genome shotgun sequencing of microbial communities
1Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of California, Berkeley, USA. kevinc@cs.berkeley.edu
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.
Related Concept Videos
Genomics
RNA-seq
Before the discovery of RNA-seq, microarray-based methods and Sanger sequencing were used for transcriptome analysis. However, while microarray-based...
Genome Annotation and Assembly
Modern Molecular Taxonomy
Applications of Molecular Taxonomy

