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Annual Review of Marine Science

Volume 17, 2025

Beyond Meta-Omics: Functional Genomics in Future Marine Microbiome Research

  • Yin Chen1,2
  • 1College of Marine Life Sciences, Ocean University of China, Qingdao, China 2School of Life Sciences, University of Warwick, Coventry, United Kingdom; email: [email protected]
  • Vol. 17:577-592 (Volume publication date January 2025)
  • First published as a Review in Advance on July 01, 2024
  • Copyright © 2025 by the author(s).
    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See credit lines of images or other third-party material in this article for license information.

Abstract

When President Bill Clinton and Francis Collins, then the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, celebrated the near completion of the human genome sequence at the White House in the summer of 2000, it is unlikely that they or anyone else could have predicted the blossoming of meta-omics in the following two decades and their applications in modern human microbiome and environmental microbiome research. This transformation was enabled by the development of high-throughput sequencing technologies and sophisticated computational biology tools and bioinformatics software packages. Today, environmental meta-omics has undoubtedly revolutionized our understanding of ocean ecosystems, providing the genetic blueprint of oceanic microscopic organisms. In this review, I discuss the importance of functional genomics in future marine microbiome research and advocate a position for a gene-centric, bottom-up approach in modern oceanography. I propose that a synthesis of multidimensional approaches is required for a better understanding of the true functionality of the marine microbiome.

Keyword(s): functional genomics, hypothetical genes, microbiome, unknown functions
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2025-01-16
2025-06-22
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Beyond Meta-Omics: Functional Genomics in Future Marine Microbiome Research
Annual Review of Marine Science 17, 577 (2025); https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-marine-020123-100931
/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-marine-020123-100931
/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-marine-020123-100931
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