Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2013

DOI

10.4137/MBI.S10819

Publication Title

Microbiology Insights

Volume

6

Pages

37-48

Abstract

Microbes are the most abundant biological entities found in the biosphere. Identification and measurement of microorganisms (including viruses, bacteria, archaea, fungi, and protists) in the biosphere cannot be readily achieved due to limitations in culturing methods. A non-culture based approach, called “metagenomics”, was developed that enabled researchers to comprehensively analyse microbial communities in different ecosystems. In this study, we highlight recent advances in the field of metagenomics for analyzing microbial communities in different ecosystems ranging from oceans to the human microbiome. Developments in several bioinformatics approaches are also discussed in context of microbial metagenomics that include taxonomic systems, sequence databases, and sequence-alignment tools. In summary, we provide a snapshot for the recent advances in metagenomics approach for analyzing changes in the microbial communities in different ecosystems.

Rights

© 2013 The Authors.

This is an open access article published under an Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC 3.0) license.

Original Publication Citation

Neelakanta, G., & Sultana, H. (2013). The use of metagenomic approaches to analyze changes in microbial communities. Microbiology Insights, 6, 37-48. https://doi.org/10.4137/MBI.S10819

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