Name for bulk-metagenomic studies?

Question

[pawhitesell]

I'm curious if there is a name for, or if any researchers are well known for conducting research using a sort of experiment/microbiome-agnostic approach to metagenomics? For instance taking a huge amount of taxonomic lists from experiments submitted to the SRA, and mining them for possible relationships that hold true regardless of environment? I'm interested in finding out what has been done before in this vein, but I haven't been able to find a proper name for this sort of thing (maybe Meta-Metagenomics?). I'm not sure if it is just such a terrible a idea that it hasn't been done because of obvious problems, or if I'm not searching correctly, or if it just hasn't been done before and is a good idea.

What is this field called?

Thanks!

[Chris Dean]

Sounds like you are describing a kind of meta-analysis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta-analysis

Answer 1

[Mensur Dlakic]

Don't know if the field you refer to has a unique name, but there are many researchers who do what you are talking about. Some researchers don't do any experimental work and only mine (meta)genomics databases, and make discoveries from those efforts. It is only in our definitions of general or universally applicable that we would classify their discoveries as specific or general. Even those who do experimental work and maybe only in a single type of environment will likely try to extend their discoveries into general directions if that's where their research leads.

The point is that the amount of sequence data out there is pretty daunting, and patterns are not always easy to extract. It requires good knowledge of many disciplines, or better yet teams of people with unique but still somewhat overlapping backgrounds. There is also a strong resource requirement, as databases are gigantic and require lots of disk space, memory, and computational power to be processed properly. A strong hypothesis and good understanding of biology don't hurt either. It is also worth remembering that statistical significance and biological relevance do not always coincide in the same finding. Anyway, the kinds of work you talk about are typically published in general journals with high visibility. Here is a recent example:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04332-2

If you open Science, Nature, or any of their sister journals (Nature Biotechnology, Nat. Communications, Nat. Microbiology) and scroll through several issues, chances are pretty good that you will find something along the lines of your interest. People don't make Earth-shattering discoveries each month or even each decade, but in any given year there will be many discoveries with various degrees of generality.

Answer 2

[colindaven]

Comparative metagenomics - researchers LOVE making up new names for stuff.

Peer Bork's group has been doing such analyses for many years, as have others.

https://www.osti.gov/sciencecinema/biblio/1014415

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15845853/

The serratus virus discovery approach which just came out is also similar:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04332-2