Biobanking covers not just human samples, but also plants, animals, prokaryotic and viruses. The genomic content in an environmental sample such as soil is known as the metagenome. It has been estimated that up to 99% of organisms in the environment are unculturable, therefore unbiased sequencing is the only way to quantify their presence.
Igenbio, Inc. has announced the expansion of its metagenomics service to include microbial community profiling, and microbial community metabolic analysis. Igenbio’s microbial community analysis service is intended to aid research in microbiome, environmental, and clinical studies. Igenbio’s scientists’ can guide the development of custom assays. Analysis includes rRNA, to whole metagenome sequencing, and qPCR. Igenbio’s flagship product ERGO 2.0 enables researchers to deepen the analysis of expression data on interactive exportable metabolic pathway visualizations enabling industrial, academic, and medical scientists to rapidly discover and develop diagnostic biomarkers.
ERGO 2.0 is a systems biology informatics toolkit centered on comparative genomics to capture, query, and visualize sequenced genomes. Using Igenbio’s proprietary algorithms, and the most comprehensive genomic database integrated with the largest collection of microbial metabolic and non-metabolic pathways, ERGO™ assigns functions to genes, integrates genes into pathways, and identifies previously unknown or mischaracterized genes, cryptic pathways, and gene products.
The ERGO database contains over 2700 manually curated genomes, over 8500 metabolic pathways, over 1 million unique, functional annotations, over 8.5 million protein sequences, over 20.5 million functional assignments and an astonishing 8 billion orthologous protein connections. This quality curated data is the key that facilitates first-rate research which can form the basis of long term product development. ERGO is updated every month with new and updated genomes.
ERGO has been used in publications that cover comparative genomics, transcriptomics, biofuel, dairy, drug discovery, food and agriculture, metabolic reconstruction, biodefense, grants and collaborations, genome, technology, and pathogenomics. Clearly there is scope to add value to an existing environmental biobank collection using ERGO.
Sources
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180213006609/en
