TerraGenome: International Soil Metagenome Sequencing Consortium.

Is it possible to completely sequence the genomes of the tens of thousands of bacteria, archaea, and fungi that inhabit a single gram of soil? This is a fundamental question that the TerraGenome International Soil Metagenome Consortium wishes to facilitate answering, along with related questions that deal with how microbial phylogenetic and functional gene diversity patterns respond and correlate to ecosystem functional processes, environmental factors, climate change, and management practices. The TerraGenome Consortium, was established in December 2008 as an extension of Metasoil, a French research initiative that aims to obtain deep sequence information about a reference soil collected from the historic long-term field station at Rothamsted in the UK. This presentation will provide an update of that effort, a report on the discussions of a TerraGenome workshop held in June 2009, and summarize efforts in the United States related to sequencing the soil metagenome.