Open Metagenomics: Selenium in the Oceans
Well, I have previously started an "Open Evolution" series here and now I am starting an "Open Metagenomics" series. I know, I have gotten grief from some out there (yes, you Rob Edwards - see comments here) about my support for somewhat non-open things in metagenomics, so I am going to try and make up for that as much as possible. In the first installment, I am pointing people to a new paper on PLoS Genetics "Trends in Selenium Utilization in Marine Microbial World Revealed through the Analysis of the Global Ocean Sampling (GOS) Project" by Yan Zhang, Vadim N. Gladyshev (hat tip to Katie Pollard for pointing out this paper). In this paper the authors study selenium utilization using data from the first part of the Venter Global Ocean Survey (GOS) which was metagneomic sequencing from multiple samples - mostly surface ocean water. The GOS data they use comes from the Rusch et al. paper in PLoS Biology (note for full disclosure ... I was a co-author on this paper.)
