Metagenomics for Greener Production and Extraction of Hydrocarbon Energy

Written by Xiaoli Dong

Project Title : Metagenomics for greener production and extraction of hydrocarbon energy

Project Leader: Gerrit Voordouw


The Genome Canada Bioinformatics provides the following services to the HMP project: (http://www.hydrocarbonmetagenomics.com)   
The BIP has developed an integrated SSU rRNA data analysis pipeline named Phoenix to analyze the SSU rRNA sequence data from environmental 16S amplicon pyrosequencing. The pipeline uses a number of statistical tools and software packages. Mothur is used to assign the SSU sequences which passed the quality control process  to operational taxonomic units (OTUs) based on a distance matrix and   calculate the collector's curves for observed OTUs, the Chao1, ACE richness estimators, and Shannon's and Simpson's diversity indices. The Unifrac and Fast Unifrac are used to evaluate the differences among the sampled communities. The local developed algorithms are used to categorize SSU rRNA sequences into the higher-oder taxonomy. The pipeline also provides Megan, dendroscope compatible input files to do the phylogenetic tree visualization. The BIP is also responsible to the  metagenomics data assembly, annotation, taxonomic binnin