The study of all genomes present in any given environment without the need for prior individual identification or amplification is termed metagenomics. For example, in its simplest form a metagenomic study might be the direct sequence results of DNA extracted from a bucket of sea water.

The EBI resources of the European Nucleotide Archive (in particular Sequence Read Archive and EMBL-Bank), UniProt, InterPro, Ensembl Genomes and IntAct are all used for analysis by metagenomic researchers, but not in an integrated manner. We intend to provide a user friendly interface to these services, promoting their utility in the field of metagenomics. It will enable protein prediction, function analysis, comparison to complete reference genomes and metabolic pathway analysis.

The code here will include everything that has been generated to fulfill the above criteria, including the design of the web portal to submit and browse data.

MGportal is being developed as an open source project at EMBL European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI).

The web portal is under development. Please visit us to see the latest version on http://www.ebi.ac.uk/metagenomics/.