The Application of Metagenomic Approaches in the Management of Infectious Diseases

Over the past decades, although billions of dollars has been invested and much progress has been made in the prevention and surveillance of infectious diseases, the mortality caused by these diseases is still hovering at high level. Infectious diseases are constantly threatening lives of millions of people around the world. For the diagnosis of these diseases, traditional culture-dependent methods are playing vital roles in clinical practice, but they still cannot meet the requirement of rapid detection of both known and unknown pathogens in a high-throughput mode. The emergence of next-generation sequencing (NGS) technology has greatly promoted the development of genome research, and the NGS-based metagenomics is gaining more and more attention as a potential technique for the management of infectious diseases. This review gives a brief summarization of the application of metagenomics in infectious diseases in recent years.