If you were part of an organization that was generating huge amounts of genomic data, what would you do about recovering the most important biological information from it? The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, which has funded ambitious research in marine microbiology and environmental genomics, is faced with exactly that problem. "Metagenomic" techniques involve simultaneously characterizing the genomes of whole communities of organisms in an environment. This approach promises great progress in our understanding of the abundance and distribution of microorganisms in the environment, but methods are not well-developed for analyzing the huge quantities of mixed data it generates.
To meet this challenge, the Moore foundation recently awarded CEEB's Jessica Green and her collaborators Jonathan Eisen and Katherine Pollard (both at University of California, Davis) a three-year, $1.8 million research grant, "Integrating Evolutionary, Ecological, and Statistical Approaches to Metagenomics". The team will develop computational and theoretical strategies to efficiently extract information about microbial diversity, evolution, and function from environmental metagenomic data.
