A Large-Scale Statistical Survey of Environmental Metagenomes

A metagenome is a sampling of genetic sequences from the entire microbial community within an environment. Examining the func-tional diversity represented by these sequences gives insight into the biological processes within the environment as well as the biological differences between environments. Most research has focused on sin-gle specific environments and the few comparative analyses have been based only on small fractions of the metagenomic data which is cur-rently available. Dinsdale et al used canonical discriminant analysis to investigate 45 microbial metagenomes in Functional metagenomic profiling of nine biomes, Nature, 452, (2008), 629-632. We expand on this work by applying a wider variety of multivariate statistic and ma-chine learning techniques to study over 200 metagenomes from various human, marine, terrestrial, and extreme environments. Our findings demonstrate the ability to differentiate or predict environments wit