元基因组学方法在环境微生物中的研究进展

Progress in the Study of Environmental Microbes by Metagenomic Methods

新一代测序技术的快速发展,使得元基因组学研究方法成为了理解环境微生物群落结构和相互作用的重要手段之一。元基因组学方法不需要将环境样本中的微生物单独分离培养,而是作为整体进行研究,因而可以回避传统研究时分离培养微生物的困难。基于这一优势,人体、海洋和土壤等环境有关的各项环境微生物测序计划相继启动,并取得了一系列重要的研究进展。探讨了元基因组测序数据分析中所经常采用的方法,以及有关流程的优势和局限性,并进一步讨论了这些方法在各种环境微生物研究中的应用和成果。

With the development of Next Generation Sequencing Technology（NGS）, metagenomics has become a significant strategy to understand the structures of environmental microbial community and their interactions. Metagenomics analyzes the environmental microbes as a whole rather than extracting the individuals for culture and thus it can avoid the troubles of conventional culturing progress and bypass the accompanying difficulties. Due to this advantage, several sequencing projects of environmental microbes on human, ocean, soil etc. have been launched and largely promoted the progress on metagenomic studies. In this review, we will discuss both the merits and restrictions of current methods and pipelines adopted in the analysis on metagenomic data and introduce the progress brought by their applications in the researches of various environmental samples.