Shotgun Metagenomics

Shotgun Metagenomics is a sequencing technology allowing for analysis of all genes of all organisms, present in a sample providing functional insights on the microbiome in clinical (in vivo or in vitro), environmental or food samples.
It pinpoints at key processes underlying the changes in the microbiome, related to the studied health issues and associates the processes and altered functions with specific microbes in the microbiome. The technology is of added value providing functional information on the microbial communities, as opposed to 16S Illumina profiling which allow for community profiling of microbiota only, assessing the presence/absence of specific community members without providing any information on their functionality.