Scientific field that encompasses the culture-independent studies of the structure and function of microbial communities and their interactions with the habitats they occupy. Metagenomics includes:
- gunshot sequencing of microbial DNA isolated directly from a given environment; and
- High-throughput screening of expression libraries generated from cloned community DNA to identify specific functions such as antibiotic resistance (functional metagenomics).
DNA analyses provide the basis for "profiling" mRNA and proteins of a microbiome (meta-transcriptomics and meta-proteomics) and for identifying the metabolic network of a community (meta-metabolomics).