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Metagenomics is the study of the metagenome—the collective genome of microorganisms from an environmental sample—to provide information on the microbial diversity and ecology of a specific environment. Shotgun metagenomics refers to the approach of shearing DNA extracted from the environmental sample and sequencing the small fragments.
Here, the authors develop Pangaea, an assembler that uses short-reads with long-range connectivity to create high-quality microbial genomes affordably, showing it outperforms existing methods in generating more complete genomes from both mock and real metagenomic samples.
A metagenomic analysis of 1,142 field-collected Anopheles gambiae mosquito specimens by the Microsoft Premonition Bayesian mixture model pipeline revealed a diverse set of vertebrate hosts, as well as the presence of Plasmodium parasites and other microbes.
In this study, the authors employ metagenomics to explore the impact of environmental pollution on the human gut microbiome using samples from a cohort living in a very polluted area in Southern Italy, showing that pollutants degradation genes are more abundant in subjects with higher blood levels of those specific xenobiotics.
Microbial migration profoundly impacts ecosystems. Here, the authors introduce a statistical approach to explore microbial dispersion following fecal microbiota transplant, uncovering dependencies between colonizing taxa, with insights into community dynamics.
Multidisciplinary culture-dependent and -independent techniques elucidate the unique microbial nitrogen cycle in nutrient-poor coastal Antarctica soils and reveal the contribution of novel key microbes to their nitrogen budget.
Metatranscriptomic data from more than 2,000 mosquitoes of 81 species show that the composition of mosquito viral communities is determined more by host phylogeny than by climate and land-use factors, which will help to inform arbovirus surveillance.
This Genome Watch highlights different tools and strategies used to enhance the quality of metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs) generated in microbiome studies.
An experiment that simulates rainfall events in dry soils reveals that virus members of the soil microbiome maintain the turnover of prokaryotic host communities through a ‘cull-the-winner’ model.