Cataloging the global microbiome. Very big data for very small things

The global microbiome is the collection of all microbes living on planet Earth. To study this system, we have developed approaches and methods to catalog this habitat, resulting in the Global Microbial Gene Catalog, version 1 (GMGCv1) and SPIRE, a collection of metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs). Recently, we have expanded this work to also include small open reading frames (we currently consider all open reading frames ≥10 amino acids). We first built a catalogue of smorfs, which contains almost 1 billion sequences.