Metagenomic Systems Biology

The book serves as an amalgamation of knowledge and principles used in the area of systems and synthetic biology, and targets inter-disciplinary research groups. The readers from diversified areas would be benefited by the valuable resources and information available in one book. Microbiome projects with efficient data handling can fuel progress in the area of microbial synthetic biology by providing a ready to use plug and play chassis. Advances in gene editing technology such as the use of tailor made synthetic transcription factors will further enhance the availability of synthetic devices to be applied in the fields of environment, agriculture and health. The different chapters of the book reviews a broad range of topics, including food microbiome in ecology, use of microbiome in personalized medicine, machine learning in biomedicine. The book also describes ways to harness and exploit the incredible amounts of genomic data. The book is not only limited to medicine but also caters to the needs of environmentalists, biochemical engineers etc. It will be of interest to advanced students and researchers in life sciences, computational biology, microbiology and other inter-disciplinary areas.

Although we can't usually see them, microbes are essential for every part of human life-indeed all life on Earth. The emerging field of metagenomics offers a new way of exploring the microbial world that will transform modern microbiology and lead to practical applications in medicine, agriculture, alternative energy, environmental remediation, and many others areas. Metagenomics allows researchers to look at the genomes of all of the microbes in an environment at once, providing a "meta" view of the whole microbial community and the complex interactions within it. It's a quantum leap beyond traditional research techniques that rely on studying-one at a time-the few microbes that can be grown in the laboratory. At the request of the National Science Foundation, five Institutes of the National Institutes of Health, and the Department of Energy, the National Research Council organized a committee to address the current state of metagenomics and identify obstacles current researchers are facing in order to determine how to best support the field and encourage its success. The New Science of Metagenomics recommends the establishment of a "Global Metagenomics Initiative" comprising a small number of large-scale metagenomics projects as well as many medium- and small-scale projects to advance the technology and develop the standard practices needed to advance the field. The report also addresses database needs, methodological challenges, and the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration in supporting this new field.

In this book, the latest tools available for functional metagenomics research are described.This research enables scientists to directly access the genomes from diverse microbial genomes at one time and study these “metagenomes”. Using the modern tools of genome sequencing and cloning, researchers have now been able to harness this astounding metagenomic diversity to understand and exploit the diverse functions of microorganisms. Leading scientists from around the world demonstrate how these approaches have been applied in many different settings, including aquatic and terrestrial habitats, microbiomes, and many more environments. This is a highly informative and carefully presented book, providing microbiologists with a summary of the latest functional metagenomics literature on all specific habitats.

This book focuses on innovative experimental and computational approaches for charting interaction networks in bacterial species. The first part of the volume consists of nine chapters, focusing on biochemical and genetics and genomics approaches including yeast two hybrid, metagenomics, affinity purification in combination with mass spectrometry, chromatin-immunoprecipitation coupled with sequencing, large-scale synthetic genetic screens, and quantitative-based mass spectrometry strategies for mapping the bacterial physical, functional, substrate, and regulatory interaction networks needed for interpreting biological networks, inferring gene function, enzyme discovery, and identifying new drug targets. The second part comprises five chapters, covering the network of participants for protein folding and complex enzyme maturation. It also covers the structural approaches required to understand bacterial intramembrane proteolysis and the structure and function of bacterial proteins involved in surface polysaccharides, outer membrane, and envelope assembly. This volume concludes with a focus on computational and comparative genomics approaches, especially network-based methods for predicting physical or functional interactions, and integrative analytical approaches for generating more reliable information on bacterial gene function. This book provides foundational knowledge in the understanding of prokaryotic systems biology by illuminating how bacterial genes f unction within the framework of global cellular processes. The book will enable the microbiology community to create substantive resources for addressing many pending unanswered questions, and facilitate the development of new technologies that can be applied to other bacterial species lacking experimental data. ​ ​

Recent advances in next-generation sequencing have enabled high-throughput determination of biological sequences in microbial communities, also known as microbiomes. The large volume of data now presents the challenge of how to extract knowledge—recognize patterns, find similarities, and find relationships—from complex mixtures of nucleic acid sequences currently being examined. In this chapter we review basic concepts as well as state-of-the-art techniques to analyze hundreds of samples which each contain millions of DNA and RNA sequences. We describe the general character of sequence data and describe some of the processing steps that prepare raw sequence data for inference. We then describe the process of extracting features from the data, assigning taxonomic and gene labels to the sequences. Then we review methods for cross-sample comparisons: (1) using similarity measures and ordination techniques to visualize and measure differences between samples and (2) feature selection and classification to select the most relevant features for discriminating between samples. Finally, in conclusion, we outline some open research problems and challenges left for future research.

Breakthroughs in high-throughput genome sequencing and high-performance computing technologies have empowered scientists to decode many genomes including our own. Now they have a bigger ambition: to fully understand the vast diversity of microbial communities within us and around us, and to exploit their potential for the improvement of our health and environment. In this new field called metagenomics, microbial genomes are sequenced directly from the habitats without lab cultivation. Computational metagenomics, however, faces both a data challenge that deals with tens of tera-bases of sequences and an algorithmic one that deals with the complexity of thousands of species and their interactions.This interdisciplinary book is essential reading for those who are interested in beginning their own journey in computational metagenomics. It is a prism to look through various intricate computational metagenomics problems and unravel their three distinctive aspects: metagenomics, data engineering, and algorithms. Graduate students and advanced undergraduates from genomics science or computer science fields will find that the concepts explained in this book can serve as stepping stones for more advanced topics, while metagenomics practitioners and researchers from similar disciplines may use it to broaden their knowledge or identify new research targets.

Comprehensive coverage of the many different aspects of systems biology, resulting in an excellent overview of the experimental and computational approaches currently in use to study biological systems. Each chapter represents a valuable introduction to one specific branch of systems biology, while also including the current state of the art and pointers to future directions. Following different methods for the integrative analysis of omics data, the book goes on to describe techniques that allow for the direct quantification of carbon fluxes in large metabolic networks, including the use of 13C labelled substrates and genome-scale metabolic models. The latter is explained on the basis of the model organism Escherichia coli as well as the human metabolism. Subsequently, the authors deal with the application of such techniques to human health and cell factory engineering, with a focus on recent progress in building genome-scale models and regulatory networks. They highlight the importance of such information for specific biological processes, including the ageing of cells, the immune system and organogenesis. The book concludes with a summary of recent advances in genome editing, which have allowed for precise genetic modifications, even with the dynamic control of gene expression. This is part of the Advances Biotechnology series, covering all pertinent aspects of the field with each volume prepared by eminent scientists who are experts on the topic in question.

Concisely discussing the application of high throughput analysis to move forward our understanding of microbial principles, Metagenomics for Microbiology provides a solid base for the design and analysis of omics studies for the characterization of microbial consortia. The intended audience includes clinical and environmental microbiologists, molecular biologists, infectious disease experts, statisticians, biostatisticians, and public health scientists. This book focuses on the technological underpinnings of metagenomic approaches and their conceptual and practical applications. With the next-generation genomic sequencing revolution increasingly permitting researchers to decipher the coding information of the microbes living with us, we now have a unique capacity to compare multiple sites within individuals and at higher resolution and greater throughput than hitherto possible. The recent articulation of this paradigm points to unique possibilities for investigation of our dynamic relationship with these cellular communities, and excitingly the probing of their therapeutic potential in disease prevention or treatment of the future. Expertly describes the latest metagenomic methodologies and best-practices, from sample collection to data analysis for taxonomic, whole shotgun metagenomic, and metatranscriptomic studies Includes clear-headed pointers and quick starts to direct research efforts and increase study efficacy, eschewing ponderous prose Presented topics include sample collection and preparation, data generation and quality control, third generation sequencing, advances in computational analyses of shotgun metagenomic sequence data, taxonomic profiling of shotgun data, hypothesis testing, and mathematical and computational analysis of longitudinal data and time series. Past-examples and prospects are provided to contextualize the applications.