BRANFORD, Conn.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The study of microbial communities from environmental samples, known as metagenomics, has been propelled forward by technological advancements in high-throughput, low-cost sequencing such as 454’s Genome Sequencer FLX System. With the recent use of sequencing approaches for metagenomic analysis, the major research challenges have shifted from generating to analyzing data. To resolve these analysis bottlenecks, a team of researchers from Argonne National Laboratory, The University of Chicago, and San Diego State University have developed an open source system for automated processing of metagenomic sequence data. The resource, designed specifically for data files generated by the 454 Sequencing platform, generates phylogenetic and functional summaries of the genomes by comparing the sequence against protein and nucleotide databases.
