The computational methods and analysis platform developed by the ELIXIR Marine Metagenomics Community helped identify unknown bacteria in the human gut.
The team of researchers from EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) and the Wellcome Sanger Institute identified almost 2000 previously uncultured bacteria species living in the human gut. The researchers used a range of metagenomics analysis methods developed for the EMBL-EBI’s metagenomics resource MGnify, with synergies between this research and ongoing efforts within the context of the ELIXIR Marine Metagenomics Community to improve marine metagenomics analysis.
More specifically, the MGnify team have deployed their pipelines on Cloud compute infrastructure that has, and continues, to allow them to run complex metagenomics analysis on a broad range of biomes, particularly on samples from the human gut and marine environment.
The results, published this week in the journal Nature, demonstrate the broader impact of the ELIXIR infrastructure. While the ELIXIR Marine Metagenomics Community focuses on serving the marine research community, its results can have direct application in related fields and can lead to new scientific discoveries.
Read more: Almost 2000 unknown bacteria discovered in the human gut (EMBL-EBI press release).