Zeitschrift für Ökosystem und Ökologie

Abstrakt

ECOMICS:Ecosystem Trans-OMICS Tools and Methods for Complex Environmental Samples and Datasets

Jun Kikuchi, Yoshiyuki Ogata and Kazuo Shinozaki

Despite the apparent detachment of modern industrial societies from natural ecosystems, such systems continue to provide enormous and essential benefits in the form of ecosystem services, including potable water, clean air, and forest products and fisheries. Further, engineered ecosystems, but ecosystems nevertheless, provide the majority of agricultural and additional forestry products. Relationships between ecosystem services and human needs can be identified by connecting genomic information of component organisms with enzyme functions, metabolic pathways and resulting product chemicals such as biomass. Tools that advance the understanding of ecosystem function from the perspective of both environmental and metabolic systems are an important aspect of the emerging systems approach to biological science. We introduce here a web service designated “ECOMICS” to provide an omics approach to clarify such relationships. ECOMICS comprises the E-class web tool for taxonomic (metagenomic) classification based on prokaryotic and eukaryotic ribosomal sequences and selected functional (enzymatic) classification based on sequential domains, FT2DB for the digitization of NMR spectra for chemicals from metabolic to macromolecular phenotyping, Bm-Char for the chemical (macromolecular biomass) assignment of lignocellulose components, and HetMap for identifying and viewing correlations between heterogeneous trans-omics data sets that are produced by such web tools. This website is open to the public domain: https://database.riken.jp/ecomics/.