Warwick Medical School, University of Warwick, Warwick, UK.
Microbiology Group, The Rowett Institute, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, UK.
Nat Biotechnol. 2017 Sep 12;35(9):833-844. doi: 10.1038/nbt.3935.
Diverse microbial communities of bacteria, archaea, viruses and single-celled eukaryotes have crucial roles in the environment and in human health. However, microbes are frequently difficult to culture in the laboratory, which can confound cataloging of members and understanding of how communities function. High-throughput sequencing technologies and a suite of computational pipelines have been combined into shotgun metagenomics methods that have transformed microbiology. Still, computational approaches to overcome the challenges that affect both assembly-based and mapping-based metagenomic profiling, particularly of high-complexity samples or environments containing organisms with limited similarity to sequenced genomes, are needed. Understanding the functions and characterizing specific strains of these communities offers biotechnological promise in therapeutic discovery and innovative ways to synthesize products using microbial factories and can pinpoint the contributions of microorganisms to planetary, animal and human health.
多样的微生物群落，包括细菌、古菌、病毒和单细胞真核生物，在环境和人类健康中起着至关重要的作用。然而，微生物在实验室中通常难以培养，这使得对其成员进行编目以及理解群落如何发挥功能变得复杂。高通量测序技术和一系列计算管道已被结合到宏基因组学方法中，这些方法彻底改变了微生物学。尽管如此，仍需要计算方法来克服影响基于组装和基于映射的宏基因组分析的挑战，特别是对于高复杂性样本或含有与测序基因组相似性有限的生物体的环境。了解这些群落的功能和特征特定菌株为治疗发现提供了生物技术的前景，并为使用微生物工厂合成产品提供了创新方法，还可以确定微生物对行星、动物和人类健康的贡献。
