Handling metagenomics data

There’s an interesting post over at The Tree of Life, with links to presentations (PDF and video) from the recent Metagenomics 2007 meeting.

Metagenomics or “community sequencing” is a relatively young science. It’s essentially a research field that tries to make sense out of a big mess and without adequate computational tools to handle the sequence data, a big mess is all that you’ll have. It’s interesting to see how researchers are approaching the problem. I especially liked the slides (PDF 2.1 MB) from Dawn Field’s group, which discuss standards for metagenomic data and a variety of mashups such as using Google Maps for geolocation of samples. Good to see that the Genomic Standards Consortium have a WordPress blog and a wiki.

Some software platforms under development are discussed at Konrad Förstner’s blog.