Well Forest Rohwer is at it again. He just is always doing something I find worth paying attention to.
First, he does fascinating and pioneering science on viruses in the environment. For example, consider that he was one of if not the first to do random shotgun metagenomics from environmental samples. See his lab's 2001 and 2002 papers on the topic (Production of shotgun libraries using random amplification and Genomic analysis of uncultured marine viral communities) which I note came out before the Sargasso and Acid Mine Drainage papers which most cite as the first environmental shotgun sequencing pubs.
Second, he studies incredibly interesting topics that take him all over the world, mostly to coastal locations. See for example - Comparative metagenomics of microbial traits within oceanic viral communities and Microbial diversity associated with four functional groups of benthic reef algae and the reef-building coral Montastraea annularis and Viral and microbial community dynamics in four aquatic environments and Metagenomic and stable isotopic analyses of modern freshwater microbialites in Cuatro Ciénegas, Mexico and more.
Third, he also develops useful bioinformatics approaches to studying metagenomes. See Phylogenetic classification of short environmental DNA fragments and Power law rank-abundance models for marine phage communities and FastGroupII: a web-based bioinformatics platform for analyses of large 16S rDNA libraries and others.
In fact, you could say in many ways we do very similar work, except he focuses on viruses. Not that we always agree mind you. I once gave a talk after him at a meeting and I changed my title to "Seeing the Forest and Missing the Trees" in a little dig at his not using phylogenetic methods and in his approach to metagenomic analysis. But I digress. What I want to write about today is a new paper from his lab: Black reefs: iron-induced phase shifts on coral reefs.
