WALNUT CREEK, CA--To tackle the computational challenges of analyzing the complex world of microbial communities, the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (DOE JGI) has released to the worldwide research community IMG/M, an experimental metagenome data management and analysis system. IMG/M integrates aggregate genome (also known as metagenome) data from diverse environmental microbial communities with isolate microbial genome data from JGI’s Integrated Microbial Genomes (IMG) system and allows the application of IMG’s comparative analysis tools on metagenome data. New tools also enable the examination of functional annotation profiles across microbial communities and isolated organisms of interest, and the analysis of strain-level heterogeneity within a species population in metagenome data.
