Blog Series: WoG, Cesky Krumlov: Day 10: How beavers and black queens teach us about Metagenomics...

Robert Beiko
Dalhousie University
Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

Topic: Metagenomics

So the term 'metagenomics' was coined by Jo Handelsman in 1998. Metagenomics describes the functional and sequence based analysis of the collective microbial genomes contained in an environmental sample.

• This rather 'pure' definition excludes PCR based metagenomic studies as they only provide information about one gene.

The beaver gut is an example of a microbial community hard at work digesting the wood the beaver eats. Unfortunately, as I learned anew today...that microbial community is apparently also nom-i-licious and also gets digested at some point. Sucks to be them. But given turnover the cycle continues, the wood is digested and the balance of nature maintained. Still sucks to be a bacterium in the beaver gut...I gotta say.

Metagenomics asks two essential questions:

1. Who is there?
2. What are they doing?