"Exploring Microbial Diversity using Metagenomics"

Shibu Yooseph, Venter Institute, Rockville, MD

...We present our findings on shotgun sequence data generated from samples taken by the Sorcerer II Global Ocean Sampling (GOS) Expedition. These data reveal the incredible diversity and heterogeneity in naturally occurring marine microbial populations. Over 6 million proteins are predicted in the GOS data. Besides nearly doubling the number of current proteins, the GOS proteins add a great amount of diversity to known protein families and shed light on their evolution. The GOS proteins cover nearly all known prokaryotic protein families. In addition, a large number of novel protein families are also predicted from these data. Several protein domains that were previously categorized as kingdom-specific, have GOS examples in other kingdoms. Our analysis indicates that we are still far from discovering all protein families that exist in nature.