Microbial metaomics discussion group this week: metatranscriptomics and biogeography

A visiting student at my lab Lea Benedicte Skov Hansen will be leading our "metaomics" discussion group this week.  We will be discussing a combination of metatranscriptomics and biogeography and the papers of the week are:

Metatranscriptomics paper:

Microbial community gene expression in ocean surface waters. Frias-Lopez J, Shi Y, Tyson GW, Coleman ML, Schuster SC, Chisholm SW, Delong EF. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2008 Mar 11;105(10):3805-10. Epub 2008 Mar 3.

Fun with microbial diversity studies: SitePainter

Nice new tool out there: SitePainter: A tool for exploring biogeographical patterns by Antonio Gonzalez, Jesse Stombaugh, Christian L. Lauber, Noah Fierer and Rob Knight.

I saw the paper and figured I would see if I could get it up and running.

First I downloaded the software from source forge.

Then I uncompressed it and tried to run it.  When I opened the index.html file in Chrom I got a message saying it only worked in Firefox.  So then I opened it in Firefox and I got an error saying it only worked in newer versions of Firefox.  So I downloaded the latest version of Firefox and then finally the tool opened.  I then followed the simple tutorial they have provided and Voila I was up and running in a few minutes

Completely cool.  Going to definitely have to try this out with our own site-variable microbial data.

Crosspost from microBEnet: Where is metagenomic analysis heading? Hopefully in directions suggested in this paper.

Figure 3 from Raes et al. Molecular Systems Biology 7 #473  doi:10.1038/msb.2011.6 

Just a quick post here.  I have been reading this paper: Toward molecular trait-based ecology through integration of biogeochemical, geographical and metagenomic data by Jeroen Raes et al. in Molecular Systems Biology.  This integration they try to pull off in the paper is to me where we need to move as a field (i.e., microbial ecology) in order to make full use of metagenomic data.  The paper provides a nice overview of microbial biogeography too.  Definitely worth a read.

Am crossposting this from the microBEnet blog (microBEnet is the site for the microbiology of the built environment network that I am building):