INFRASTRUCTURE FOR METAGENOME DATA MANAGEMENT AND ANALYSIS

Metagenome sequencing projects are generating unprecedented amounts of data. Public sequence archive databases are challenged with large-scale data management issues including data storage, quick search and retrieval of the sequence data for further analysis. The sequence data is linked to the rich set of metadata attributes such as geochemical and ecological parameters for environmental projects and clinical patient information for human microbiome studies. That complex collection of heterogeneous information has to be integrated, organized and presented to the users in a meaningful and the most useful way. For the last 20 years The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) has been developing the infrastructure that allows an easy storage and distribution of various types of bimolecular data as well as data integration and easy navigation in complex information space. Here we describe NCBI resources that are used for metagenomics data management.