Perspectives
Nature Reviews Microbiology 6, 693-699 (September 2008) | doi:10.1038/nrmicro1935
Article series: Systems Microbiology
Timeline: Molecular eco-systems biology: towards an understanding of community function
Jeroen Raes1 & Peer Bork1 About the authors
Abstract
Systems-biology approaches, which are driven by genome sequencing and high-throughput functional genomics data, are revolutionizing single-cell-organism biology. With the advent of various high-throughput techniques that aim to characterize complete microbial ecosystems (metagenomics, meta-transcriptomics and meta-metabolomics), we propose that the time is ripe to consider molecular systems biology at the ecosystem level (eco-systems biology). Here, we discuss the necessary data types that are required to unite molecular microbiology and ecology to develop an understanding of community function and discuss the potential shortcomings of these approaches.
Author affiliations
- Jeroen Raes and Peer Bork are at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Meyerhofstrasse 1, D-69117 Heidelberg, Germany. Email: raes@embl.de Email: bork@embl.de
Published online 30 June 2008
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