LAUSR

Having just celebrated a decade of “next-generation sequencing”, or high-throughput sequencing, it is easy to overlook how revolutionary these technological innovations were for microbial ecology. Before the advent of high-throughput sequencing, environmental microbiologists combined fingerprinting and clone libraries of PCR amplicons to conduct microbial biogeography studies. Even sequencing 100 cloned inserts was a cost and labour challenge for most laboratories and, at best, captured a handful of 16S rRNA gene sequences from a few dominant microbial community members. In order to reduce costs and increase sample throughput, fingerprinting of small subunit (SSU) rRNA genes was routine for microbial ecology projects, even for complex communities. In a world without mothur (Schloss et al., 2009), QIIME (Caporaso et al., 2010), phyloseq (McMurdie and Holmes, 2013), and AXIOME (Lynch et al., 2013), bioinformatic and statistical analyses were ad hoc, borrowed from macroecology laboratories and existing software packages.