Timothy M. Vogel and coauthors, in an Edtiorial in this month’s (April) Nature Reviews Microbiology (7, 252; 2009) invite the microbiology community to participate in an ambitious and extraordinary sequencing project to decipher the soil metagenome, a goal that is now within reach thanks to developments in high-throughput sequencing.

Metagenomic sequencing efforts are necessary to resolve the intricacies of the soil microbiome and to provide sufficient data to understand the diversity and function of the soil microbial communit. Vogel et al. propose a coordinated international effort, starting with agreement and cooperation from the scientific community in reaching a primary objective: the complete sequencing of a ‘reference’ soil metagenome. They write: “The soil system chosen for investigation, Park Grass, is an internationally recognized agroecology field experiment that has been running for more than 150 years at the UK agricultural sciences institute, Rothamsted Research. This ambitious reference sequencing effort cannot be undertaken by a single laboratory or even by a single country. We therefore invite the international community to participate in this project, and hope to eventually expand the project to other soil sites. The information gleaned from this project will serve as a starting block or platform for other soil metagenomic sequencing efforts and will generate new hypotheses to test.” The TerraGenome international sequencing consortium, which is dedicated to soil metagenomics, has just been launched to coordinate these efforts.