Shotgun metagenomic sequencing

Metagenomic analysis is performed to understand the dynamics of microbial communities from environmental samples. It provides classification of species-level taxonomy and the projection of metabolic pathway activities from microbial samples.

Shotgun metagenome analysis involves sequencing the complete metagenome samples followed by de novo assembly of multiple genomes from sequence reads of multiple species in an environmental sample. During assembly, the paired-end reads are compared, and overlapping reads are used to build longer contiguous sequences.

These sequences are further analysed for prediction of genes and functional annotations. 

16S/18S/ITS MicroBiome profiling analysis

The objective of metagenomics is to study the composition of the microbial communities sampled from their natural environment. It involves the analysis of the hypervariable regions of the 16S rRNA gene sequences and ITS/18S which expresses major sequence diversity among different microorganisms. The sequences are clustered against the reference sequence collection, and each resulting cluster, known as operational taxonomic unit (OTU), represents a taxonomic unit at the species or genus level based on the sequence similarity threshold. The clustering method results in an OTU table, listing the abundances of OTUs in the samples under examination. Further analysis includes evaluation of beta and alpha diversities of the samples.

Eurofins Genomics provides 16S bacterial (V3-V4 region) and ITS/18S amplicon on Illumina MiSeq sequencing platform and also provides customised amplicons such as archaea and cyanobacteria, etc.