Over at TACC, Aaron Dubrow writes that while microbes play a critical role in our environment, but much about them remains unknown. Powered by TACC supercomputers, the science of metagenomics makes it possible to investigate microbes in their natural environments and in the complex communities in which they normally live.
![](https://www.tacc.utexas.edu/image/image_gallery?img_id=820999&t=1373913350256" "Functional characterization of Indian Ocean viral sequences from the viral and larger fractions of metagenomic data in the context of KEGG pathways")
Functional characterization of Indian Ocean viral sequences.
Metagenomics is a data-intensive research area,” said JCVI researcher and associate professor, Shibu Yooseph. “We take this culture-independent approach to studying microbial communities, and the result is that most of the complexity in making inferences has been transferred to the computational end of things. TACC’s resources are incredibly useful in addressing the throughput computing requirements in this field.”
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