For the purposes of this workshop, we define metagenomics as the application of high-throughput sequencing to DNA extracted directly from environmental, uncultured samples. For example, later we will be looking at samples of microbial community found in hospital waste water.
The figure below shows how we go from environment samples, in this case hospital wastewater, to seqeunce data.
Metagenomic sampling produces a lot of sequence data, which is the starting point of bioinformatics analysis.
Metagenomics data is compositional data.
There is meaning only in the relative abundances observed in the sample.
Are you planning to use metagenomics for your study? What is the experiment design?
- Gkiir et al, Microbiome Datasets Are Compositional: And This is Not Optional, Front. Microbiol.,2017.