Microbial Gene Catalog

A team from Fudan University in Shanghai has launched the world's most comprehensive global microbial gene catalog, a database containing 303 million uni genes that will help researchers better understand the relationship between microorganisms and human health. A uni gene is a representative DNA sequence of gene sequences that stem from the same microbial species. A paper about the catalog, "Towards the Biogeography of Prokaryotic Genes", was published in the science journal Nature. Bacterial communities live in habitats and each community comprises a group of unique species called a microbiome, which contains genes with specific functions. To collect all the genes in the global microbiome to create the catalog, a team from Fudan's Institute of Science and Technology for Brain-Inspired Intelligence Luis Pedro Coelho, Zhao Xingming and Peer Bork identified uni genes from 14 environments, including human and animal bodies, soil and water. They created the database based on 13,000 pieces of publicly available data. The researchers said microbiome research is normally carried out according to different habitats, such as human microorganisms and marine microorganisms, but the catalog can analyze microbial metagenomes in different habitats on a global scale.