Excited to see our most recent Sable Island horse paper out in Molecular Ecology Resources. We show that shallow shotgun sequencing of the microbiome recapitulates similar biological patterns as amplicon sequencing at comparable costs, while also providing direct measure of functional gene contents.

Our hope is that this paper will help encourage other researchers to test shallow shotgun metagenomic approaches within their own study systems. These methods can provide ecologists and clinicians with greater functional information–and beyond the scope of any single study– contribute more to our shared metagenomic resources than amplicon sequencing.