Bioinformatics ServicesFunctional Metagenomics and Metatranscriptomics

Revealing the functional potential of a microbiome is undoubtedly one of the biggest advantages to generating shotgun metagenomic data, alongside CosmosID’s strain-level resolution capabilities. By combining the CosmosID functional analysis pipeline with taxonomic profiling and other -omics and metadata collected as part of your study, this is where one can truly unlock the microbiome.

To take functional profiling with CosmosID to the next level, have you thought about metatranscriptomics? By running metatranscriptomic data through the CosmosID functional analysis pipeline, find out which genes are actually expressed in the microbiome and discover potential biomarkers that could fuel your discovery efforts.

By querying databases like the UniRef90 database which contains non-redundant protein clusters, protein families against which hits were generated are annotated with MetaCyc reactions (metabolic enzymes) to reconstruct and quantify complete MetaCyc metabolic pathways in the microbial community sample. In addition, the UniRef_90 gene families are also mapped to GO terms functional system in order to get an overview of GO functions in the community. Lastly, to facilitate comparisons across multiple samples with different sequencing depths, the abundance values are normalized using Total-sum scaling (TSS) normalization to produce “Copies per million” (analogous to TPMs in RNA-Seq) units.

Simply consult with a member of our business development team and build a study plan to answer your principle study question. From there, the CosmosID bioinformatics services team will execute your downstream analysis where in addition to tabular abundance profiles for GO terms and MetaCyc Metabolic Pathways, you will also have the opportunity to opt into downstream statistics and reporting of functional metagenomes to visualize variations between your study cohorts.