Anjana Ghelani

Cultivation-independent comprehensive survey of bacterial diversity in Tulsi Shyam Hot Springs, India

A taxonomic description of bacteria was deduced from 5.78 Mb metagenomic sequence retrieved from Tulsi Shyam hot spring, India using bacterial tag-encoded FLX amplicon pyrosequencing (bTEFAP). Metagenome contained 10,893 16S rDNA sequences that were analyzed by MG-RAST server to generate the comprehensive profile of bacteria. Metagenomic data are available at EBI under EBI Metagenomics database with accession no. ERP009559. Metagenome sequences represented the 98.2% bacteria origin, 1.5% of eukaryotic and 0.3% were unidentified. A total of 16 bacterial phyla demonstrating 97 families and 287 species were revealed in the hot spring metagenome. Most abundant phyla were Firmicutes (65.38%), Proteobacteria (21.21%) and unclassified bacteria (10.69%). Whereas, Peptostreptococcaceae (37.33%), Clostridiaceae (23.36%), and Enterobacteriaceae (16.37%) were highest reported families in metagenome. Ubiquitous species were Clostridium bifermentans (17.47%), Clostridium lituseburense (13.93%) and uncultured bacterium (10.15%). Our data provide new information on hot spring bacteria and shed light on their abundance, diversity, distribution and coexisting organisms.

Web Resources for Metagenomics Studies

The development of next-generation sequencing (NGS) platforms spawned an enormous volume of data. This explosion in data has unearthed new scalability challenges for existing bioinformatics tools. The analysis of metagenomic sequences using bioinformatics pipelines is complicated by the substantial complexity of these data. In this article, we review several commonly-used online tools for metagenomics data analysis with respect to their quality and detail of analysis using simulated metagenomics data. There are at least a dozen such software tools presently available in the public domain. Among them, MGRAST, IMG/M, and METAVIR are the most well-known tools according to the number of citations by peer-reviewed scientific media up to mid-2015. Here, we describe 12 online tools with respect to their web link, annotation pipelines, clustering methods, online user support, and availability of data storage. We have also done the rating for each tool to screen more potential and preferential tools and evaluated five best tools using synthetic metagenome. The article comprehensively deals with the contemporary problems and the prospects of metagenomics from a bioinformatics viewpoint.

Bacterial tag encoded FLX titanium amplicon pyrosequencing (bTEFAP) based assessment of prokaryotic diversity in metagenome of Lonar soda lake, India

Bacterial diversity and archaeal diversity in metagenome of the Lonar soda lake sediment were assessed by bacterial tag-encoded FLX amplicon pyrosequencing (bTEFAP). Metagenome comprised 5093 sequences with 2,531,282 bp and 53 ± 2% G + C content. Metagenome sequence data are available at NCBI under the Bioproject database with accession no. PRJNA218849. Metagenome sequence represented the presence of 83.1% bacterial and 10.5% archaeal origin. A total of 14 different bacteria demonstrating 57 species were recorded with dominating species like Coxiella burnetii (17%), Fibrobacter intestinalis (12%) and Candidatus Cloacamonas acidaminovorans (11%). Occurrence of two archaeal phyla representing 24 species, among them Methanosaeta harundinacea (35%), Methanoculleus chikugoensis (12%) and Methanolinea tarda (11%) were dominating species. Significant presence of 11% sequences as an unclassified indicated the possibilities for unknown novel prokaryotes from the metagenome.

Metagenomic data of fungal internal transcribed Spacer and 18S rRNA gene sequences from Lonar lake sediment, India.

The data in this article contains the sequences of fungal Internal Transcribed Spacer (ITS) and 18S rRNA gene from a metagenome of Lonar soda lake, India. Sequences were amplified using fungal specific primers, which amplified the amplicon lined between the 18S and 28S rRNA genes. Data were obtained using Fungal tag-encoded FLX amplicon pyrosequencing (fTEFAP) technique and used to analyze fungal profile by the culture-independent method. Primary analysis using PlutoF 454 pipeline suggests the Lonar lake mycobiome contained the 29 different fungal species. The raw sequencing data used to perform this analysis along with FASTQ file are located in the NCBI Sequence Read Archive (SRA) under accession No. SRX889598 (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sra/SRX889598).

Prospects and Progress in Extreme Biosphere Microbiome

There is a considerable market potential of extremophiles and their biomolecules; however, their high evolutionary rates and culturability limitations restrict their industrial exploration. The impressive development of “omics” technologies has allowed the culture-free technique, i.e., metagenomics as a valuable tool for mining the hidden information of the extremophiles and their biospheres. At present, environmental microbiomes are being studied using functional-based and sequence-based approaches. The growth of the extreme environmental metagenomics literature and projects is increased nearly tenfold in the last decade due to the advancement in the sequencing technologies. Here, in the context, we summarize all the aspects of extreme biosphere metagenomics with recent prospects and progress.