1. Metagenomics Microbial community DNA extraction
Problem: can’t culture anything
Answer: shotgun
Thousands of unique genomes are present in most environments

2. Global Ocean Sampling (GOS)
About 200 Sampling Locations to date
Open ocean, estuary, embayment, upwelling, fringing reef, atoll, warm seep, mangrove, fresh water, biofilms, sediments, soils
Phase I: 41 samples analyzed (PLoS Biology 2007 – Rusch et. al, Yooseph et. al, Kannan et. al.)
~6 million predicted conserved proteins, doubling number in public databases
Microbial biodiversity FAR exceeded expectations
Phase 2 to Come: 100 GOS sites; >10 M sequence reads; biofilms, sediments, soils
GOS data is the size of the datasets really helps highlight the major challenges inherent to doing metagenomics.
How to go about analyzing such vast datasets? Extreme assembly - poor assembly or limited assembly with many anonymous pieces
Within all abundant populations analyzed, we found extensive intra-ribotype diversity : (1) extensive sequence variation within orthologous regions throughout a given genome; despite coverage of individual ribotypes approaching 500-fold, most individual sequencing reads are unique; (and (3) hypervariable genomic islands that are too variable to assemble..

3. CAMERA Services (Community Cyberinfrastructure for Advanced Marine Microbial Ecology Research and Analysis)
Maintain metagenomic sequence collections
ALL metagenomic sequence reads and assemblies
Country of origin identified
CAMERA protein clusters and other large analyses
Most powerful genetics search facility on Internet
Scalable parallel implementations of BLAST
Free-to-all tools (including compute time)
Up-to-date annotation of metagenomic data
Training, Support, and Outreach 3

5. “As a condition of my use of the CAMERA website, I acknowledge and agree that the genetic information available through the CAMERA website may be considered part of the genetic patrimony of the country from which the sample was obtained.
“As a user, I agree to: 1) acknowledge the country of origin in any publications where the genetic information is presented; 2) contact the CBD focal point identified on the CBD-website if I intend to use the genetic information for commercial purposes.”

7. Geographic Distribution of Registrations
Over 2300 Registered Users From 48 Countries