Bioinformatics Tools for Soil Microbiome Analysis

Abstract

Metagenomic approaches aid in exploring the structural and functional diversity of soil microorganisms. Sequence analysis of the large amount of data generated from soil microbial communities sequencing is a challenging issue. It is made feasible through bioinformatics tools, which provide sequence pipelines for the high-throughput screening of the soil metagenomic libraries. Such sequence analysis of metagenomic datasets reveals the genetic structure, gene prediction, proposed functions, and metabolic pathways of the analyzed microbial communities. Bioinformatic tools provide statistical procedures not only for comparison of metagenomic libraries but also to report the sampling and library creation artifacts. Here we discuss the bioinformatics tools for accessing the metagenomic information and platforms for data storage within databases (GenBank env), access, synthesis, and analysis.