Products

A metagenome is a collection of the genetic material of a mixed community of organisms, such as environmental and human metagenomes. It contains genomes of both cultivatable and uncultivatable microorganisms. Metagenomic sequencing enables the study of these intricate genomic landscapes embedded in ecological samples by providing more than taxonomic profiling. It also offering a functional genomics perspective by exploring the encoded genes and their putative roles in environmental processes. While traditional shotgun approaches with Illumina sequencing have been widely used in metagenomic studies, the advent of Nanopore long-read sequencing has changed the field. Nanopore technology enhances downstream bioinformatic analyses, notably metagenome assembly, ensuring more continuous assemblies. Reports indicate that Nanopore-based metagenomics has successfully generated complete and closed bacterial genomes from complex microbiomes (Moss, E. L., et al., Nature Biotech, 2020). Integrating Nanopore reads with Illumina reads provides a strategic approach for error correction, mitigating Nanopore’s inherent low accuracy. This synergistic combination leverages the strengths of each sequencing platform, offering a robust solution to overcome potential limitations and advancing the precision and reliability of metagenomic analyses.