Center for Computational Molecular Biology Seminar Series Lecture
"Exploring Microbial Diversity using Metagenomics"
Shibu Yooseph, Venter Institute, Rockville, MD
Monday, March 17, 2008 at 4:00 P.M.
Room 241 Swig Boardroom (2nd Floor CIT)
Microbes are found in such varied environments, from hot springs to the gastrointestinal tract, and have important roles in various natural processes. However, most of our knowledge on microbes is based on those few (estimated to be <1%) that we have been able to cultivate in the laboratory. Thus, we are far from a full understanding of microbial diversity. The rapidly emerging field of metagenomics seeks to understand the roles and interactions of organisms in an ecosystem by examining their genomic content. Shotgun sequencing of microbial communities offers a cultivation independent approach to studying the different players in these communities. We present our findings on shotgun sequence data generated from samples taken by the Sorcerer II Global Ocean Sampling (GOS) Expedition. These data reveal the incredible diversity and heterogeneity in naturally occurring marine microbial populations. Over 6 million proteins are predicted in the GOS data. Besides nearly doubling the number of current proteins, the GOS proteins add a great amount of diversity to known protein families and shed light on their evolution. The GOS proteins cover nearly all known prokaryotic protein families. In addition, a large number of novel protein families are also predicted from these data. Several protein domains that were previously categorized as kingdom-specific, have GOS examples in other kingdoms. Our analysis indicates that we are still far from discovering all protein families that exist in nature.
Host: Sorin Istrail
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