Trevor Charles presented an historical overview of functional metagenomics and then considered the question of how to bring this research community together. He introduced the Canadian MetaMicroBiome Library (CM2BL) initiative [2] as an example of open-resource metagenomics that was http://www.selleckchem.com/products/XL184.html motivated to unite the research community around shared tools and resources. Gabriel Moreno-Hagelsieb (Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, ON, Canada) focused his talk on the major issues related to metagenomic annotation, data sharing, and curation. He pointed out that low sequencing costs have resulted in vast amounts of DNA sequence data and many draft genomes to which metagenomic sequence data can be compared, but few serious efforts to bring these genomes to finished quality, and this affects the quality of sequence databases that contribute to sequence-based metagenomics analysis.

He emphasized the need for computer scientists to contribute to the field of metagenomics, and the need for biologists to communicate effectively with these experts. The discussion at the end of the first session was chaired by Trevor Charles and focused on the need for computer scientists within our field and raised questions about how to recruit and integrate them. Furthermore, the discussion suggested a possible need for a reward system for curation and annotation to help attract participation in this field of work by young computer scientists. Session II. Metagenomics technology overview The second session of Day 1 began with a talk by Sean Brady (Rockefeller University, New York, NY, USA), who presented details of library construction and small molecule screening.

He demonstrated that systematic library screenings enabled him to find new gene clusters and novel compounds with new or rare molecular arrangements. The next Cilengitide presenter was Don Cowan (University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa) who talked about functional enzyme screening and shared his experiences, including examples of successes and failures. His work on high throughput expression screening showed that the efficiency of finding positive clones varied enormously between different enzyme classes due to the lack of inducers or co-inducers, failure of some enzymes to fold correctly, and toxicity of some gene products to the host. Kentaro Miyazaki (National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology; AIST-Hokkaido; Sapporo, Hokkaido, Japan) presented his work on host engineering of Escherichia coli to solve the expression problems of metagenomic libraries, most notably his ability to engineer ribosomes to improve E. coli as an expression host. The discussion following the session was chaired by Sean Brady.