Title

The next meta-challenge for Bioinformatics

Authors

Willy Valdivia-Granda^{1, *}

Affiliation

¹Orion Integrated Biosciences Inc., New York, United States of America

Email

Willy.Valdivia@orionbiosciences.com; * Corresponding author

Article Type

Views & Challenges

Date

received May 15, 2008; revised May 22, 2008; accepted May 26, 2008; published May 29, 2008

Abstract

The direct sequencing of uncultivable organisms present in complex biological and environmental samples has opportunities to discover new life forms and metabolic processes. This transformational field, known as metagenomics, is generating massive amounts of molecular information that can overwhelm the performance of conventional analysis and visualization algorithms. Here, I briefly highlight some of the emerging challenges this new discipline presents to the computational biology community and point some of the opportunities to develop applications that can translate metagenomic information into biomedical, agricultural, environmental, and industrial applications.

Keywords

metagenomics; high performance computing; enterprise database; genomic barcoding

Citation

Valdivia-Granda, Bioinformation 2(8): 358-362 (2008)

Edited by

P. Kangueane

ISSN

0973-2063

Publisher

Biomedical Informatics

License

This is an Open Access article which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. This is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License.