Metagenomics

Legal and Ethical Issues 

There are some challenges that scientists face. For example scientists must determine how to best sample an environment, how many times samples should be taken, and wether a sample is representative of the environment. Improved DNA extracted from a sample adequately represents the entire community’s genome and has little or no contamination. Scientists need databases that use common standards and are accessible to the people. It is a field that needs more institutional frameworks, a broad range of fields; like chemistry, genetics, microbiology, biochemistry, pathology, ecology, evolution, soil and atmospheric sciences, geology, oceanography, statistics, computer sciences, database development, mathematics, engineering, and others have applicability to metagenomics. 

 Many scientists have faced ethical challenges with metagenomics. Current assembly programs are not well suited to assembling environmental data. New techniques must be created to further study bacterial populations as methods perviously used have very little application to the new metagenomics.  This is true for all new scientific techniques. You must be able to progress threw the limitations of todays technology and create a more sufficient way to extract that sample, or to isolate that radioactive gene. This in turn requires money which is always hard to come by, even before our great recession. It's just as the saying goes "science is business, government, and then some research." Just because you’ve got the idea you still need to bring it to life, and there are always a few road blocks.