Improving the Efficiency of Metagenomic Analysis of Soil Samples

Understanding and characterizing soil metagenomic populations can enable regulation of plant performance through improved bioavailability of nutrients, secretion of bioactive compounds, and hormones that can promote or repress plant growth. Studies have shown increased concentrations of heavy metals such as Cadmium (Cd) influence the microbial  population. Cd-contamination has the potential to reduce microbial diversity by altering the community structure within the soil. Non-contaminated soil has increased microbial diversity, genes and enzymes involved in metabolic pathways of microbial communities than the Cd-contaminated soil.1 Metabolism of different microorganisms that change in response to different environmental conditions can be studied by analysis of their metabolic footprint and metagenomics sequence analysis.

Here Revvity and Illumina® describe a streamlined, automated workflow from DNA extraction to sequenceready libraries for metagenomic shotgun sequencing resulting in high quality data for species identification and functional profiling.