The researchers have been paying more attention to culturing individual microorganisms for a long time, but the majority of microorganisms found in natural ecosystems cannot be easily cultured in the laboratory1. Metagenomics analysis of genetic material obtained directly from the environment without isolating and culturing the species in a laboratory, which is not possible with traditional methods since only a tiny fraction of all microorganisms ( ==~== 1%) can be cultivable using standard techniques2. The metagenomics analysis employs techniques that enable researchers to obtain, and sequence the genomic content of microbial communities directly, thereby bypassing the need for prior cultivation of all individual organisms present in the sample3, 4. The metagenomics offers scientists the method to study the structure of the microorganism community.
The current research of metagenome focuses on gene annotation5-7, reconstruction of the metabolism network8, analysis the diversity of the microorganisms community9, 10 and so on, which are mainly based on the known genetic fragments11-13. Since diversity in metagenomic samples is often too large to provide a high sequencing coverage of single species14-16, these methods cannot give a microscopy view of the microbial community structure from a metagenomic sample data. So, we present a tool which can predict a bacterial community from a metagenomic sample data according to the enzyme information extracted from the sample or the metabolism network reconstructed from this data. The predicted community not only covers all the known metabolic functions, but also can be used to discover unknown functions of the metagenomic samples. This tool can help researcher to form an overall understanding and find new functions in the metagenomic sample data.
The webaddress for this tool is: "http://bioinfo.ustc.edu.cn/softwares/bcp-mg/":http://bioinfo.ustc.edu.cn/softwares/bcp-mg/