Encyclopedia of Metagenomics

Sarah K. Highlander is Associate Professor in the Department of Molecular Virology and Microbiology and The Human Genome Sequencing Center at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. She received her Bachelor of Science from the University of Michigan and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Medical Microbiology from the Sackler School of Graduate Biomedical Sciences at New York University. She performed her postdoctoral research at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston. Her current research interests are in microbial genomics, metagenomics related to gastrointestinal disease, and bacteriotherapy. Her laboratory has been involved since 2007 in the NIH Human Microbiome Project (HMP) where a primary focus of her lab has been the cultivation of strains, followed by sequencing and annotation of "reference genomes" to contribute to a catalog of strains that serves as a database against which human metagenomic data are compared. Her group also played a key role in processing and characterizing samples collected from the HMP healthy cohort and she developed "mock" metagenomic communities to aid in benchmarking protocols for HMP DNA extraction, sequencing and sequence evaluation.

Francisco Rodriguez-Valera is professor of Microbiology in the University Miguel Hernandez in San Juan de Alicante Spain. He has been working on microbial diversity for over 30 years and was among the pioneers that started using metagenomics in Microbiology with iconic studies such as the deep Mediterranean Sea or the Amazon River. He has described multitude of new microbes, including the new Ca. Actinomarinidae, the smallest free living marine prokaryote, that turned out to be a member of the Actinobacteria, classically considered mycelial soil inhabitants. He has also advanced the Constant-Diversity model to explain genomic diversity in prokaryotes, and described recently more than 1000 different genomes of marine viruses using metagenomic approaches.

Bryan White is currently a