Decreasing sequencing costs and rising interest in microbial communities have led to an explosion in 16S rRNA sequencing studies. This sequencing is extremely useful, identifying bacterial units in a community and overall community structure, but cannot accurately identify functions encoded within communities. Metagenomics can be used to resolve community member identity and potential functions of those identified species. However, knowing what questions require which type of sequencing is difficult - and understanding how to analyze these data types is time-consuming. With examples across multiple systems, I will highlight what questions metagenomics can answer and how to analyze these data.
