Metagenomic Analysis of Freshwater Bacterial and Viral Biodiversity Using Shotgun Sequencing

Abstract

The metagenomic analysis is used to investigate complex microbial communities directly from the environment, without culturing or isolating organisms. It is used to identify taxonomic diversity and functional metagenomics. Shotgun metagenomic sequencing is an environmental sequencing approach that can examine thousands of organisms simultaneously and comprehensively for community function and biodiversity. It also detects the low abundance members of microbial communities. It is advantageous over 16S sequencing as it has the cross-domain coverage, greater taxonomy resolution, and functional profiling. Several studies have been carried out using the shotgun sequencing metagenomic analysis to explore the freshwater diversity especially bacterial and viral diversity in different regions. Freshwater metagenomic analysis shows the presence of unknown single-stranded DNA in arctic freshwater, an abundance of actinobacterial in Japan lakes, Virophage and Mimiviridae community in Canadian freshwater. Metagenomic analysis of Himalayan freshwater lake was conducted using non-chimeric sequence.