Review

Building on basic metagenomics with complementary technologies

Falk Warnecke and Philip Hugenholtz*

Author Affiliations

Microbial Ecology Program, DOE Joint Genome Institute, Walnut Creek, CA 94598, USA

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Genome Biology 2007, 8:231 doi:10.1186/gb-2007-8-12-231

Published: 28 December 2007

Abstract

Metagenomics, the application of random shotgun sequencing to environmental samples, is a powerful approach for characterizing microbial communities. However, this method only represents the cornerstone of what can be achieved using a range of complementary technologies such as transcriptomics, proteomics, cell sorting and microfluidics. Together, these approaches hold great promise for the study of microbial ecology and evolution.