2007-07-16

Metagenomics 2007 conference report - part 2

EN: As Jonathan has written already a nice overview of the Metagenomics 2007 conference (while I was spending my time exploring San Diego ... call me a slacker) and as the videos will be online soon, I will only post my take-home-messages:

  • The recording and use of additional meta-information might be a key-factor for a better understanding of the sequence data. Fortunately more of this data is collected now.
  • For me the gut metagenome analyzes are pretty promising projects. Masahira Hattori and Janet Jansson presented very interesting studies.
  • A lot of tools that are developed for "classical" genomics cannot simply be applied in metagenomics. This has also to be explained to funding sources.
  • Platforms like Camera, img/m and Megx are under heavy development at the moment to fulfill the needs of the community.
Any other highlights? Your opinion?

2 Kommentare:

Jonathan Eisen hat gesagt…

If you had invited me to explore San Diego, maybe I too could have been a slacker ;-)

As for other things to comment on --- I think people still underestimate the complexity of analyzing metagenomic data and personally found some of the talks to be disappointing in this area. A community is more than a bag of genes and we need to stop treating them as such and start to figure out how to better bin by organisms and/or normalize between communities.

Konrad Förstner hat gesagt…

Well, good that at least somebody did the reporter job properly. ;)

Yes, binning is really an essential, low level step that has to be solved properly before the real biology starts. I liked your proposal on the conference to set up a competition to push the development of necessary software. More reference genomes could be the other/parallel way to go. Single-cell sequencing might help here.