Advancing analytical algorithms and pipelines for billions of microbial sequences

► New technologies permit dramatic increases in number of sequences/sites per study. ► Multisite spatial/temporal studies with hundreds of millions of sequences are possible. ► New software pipelines are required to analyze these vast datasets. ► Field is increasingly moving from ad hoc scripts towards integrated pipelines. ► Multivariate techniques often introduce computational bottlenecks. ► Cloud computing and improved approximation methods are needed to avoid bottlenecks.