Metagenomics - Bioinformatics

Bioinformatics

The data generated by metagenomics experiments are both enormous and inherently noisy, containing fragmented data representing as many as 10,000 species. The sequencing of the cow rumen metagenome generated 279 gigabases, or 279 billion base pairs of nucleotide sequence data, while the human gut microbiome gene catalog identified 3.3 million genes assembled from 567.7 gigabases of sequence data. Collecting, curating, and extracting useful biological information from datasets of this size represent significant computational challenges for researchers.