ABSTRACT
Arguably, one of the most remarkable events in the field of microbial ecology in the past decade has been the advent and development of metagenomics. Metagenomics is defined as the direct genetic analysis of genomes contained with an environmental sample. The field initially started with the cloning of environmental DNA, followed by functional expression screening [1], and was then quickly complemented by direct random shotgun sequencing of environmental DNA [2,3]. These initial projects not only showed proof of principle of the metagenomic approach, but also uncovered an enormous functional gene diversity in the microbial world around us [4].
