Quantifying environmental adaptation of metabolic pathways in metagenomics.

ABSTRACT: Recently, approaches have been developed to sample the genetic content of heterogeneous environments (metagenomics). However, by what means these sequences link distinct environmental conditions with specific biological processes is not well understood. Thus, a major challenge is how the usage of particular pathways and subnetworks reflects the adaptation of microbial communities across environments and habitats-i.e., how network dynamics relates to environmental features. Previous research has treated environments as discrete, somewhat simplified classes (e.g., terrestrial vs. marine), and searched for obvious metabolic differences among them (i.e., treating the analysis as a typical classification problem). However, environmental differences result from combinations of many factors, whic

SUBMITTER: Gianoulis TA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2629784 | biostudies-literature | 2009 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature