Messages from the first International Conference on Clinical Metagenomics (ICCMg)

Metagenomics is recently entering in the clinical microbiology and an increasing number of diagnostic laboratories are now proposing the sequencing & annotation of bacterial genomes and/or the analysis of clinical samples by direct or PCR-based metagenomics with short time to results. In this context, the first International Conference on Clinical Metagenomics (ICCMg) was held in Geneva in October 2016 and several key aspects have been discussed including: i) the need for improved resolution, ii) the importance of interpretation given the common occurrence of sequence contaminants, iii) the need for improved bioinformatic pipelines, iv) the bottleneck of DNA extraction, v) the importance of gold standards, vi) the need to further reduce time to results, vii) how to improve data sharing, viii) the applications of bacterial genomics and clinical metagenomics in better adapting therapeutics and ix) the impact of metagenomics and new sequencing technologies in discovering new microbes. Further efforts in term of reduced turnaround time, improved quality and lower costs are however warranted to fully translate metagenomics in clinical applications.