The rapid development of omics technology represented by metagenomics technology has greatly promoted our understanding of microbial diversity,composition,structure,and function in the natural ecosystem.However,the big data generated by the technology can be a great challenge to researchers'data analyzing and mining abilities.This review,based on two technical aspects,amplicon and whole-genome shotgun sequencing,summarizes the analysis workflow of metagenomics for discovering microbial community.Then,the concepts of microbial community diversity,the related principles of statistical analysis,and related interpretation of statistical tests are illustrated.Finally,the paper points out that to overcome the complexity of metagenomic data and huge amount information,using big data analysis so as to illuminate analytical results are the common challenge for environmental microbiologists,bioinformaticians,and statisticians.

environmental microbiology  /  metagenomics  /  amplicon  /  bioinformatics