Metagenomics with The Banfield Lab

It’s easy to think that we’ve discovered most of the species on the planet. In fact, the booming field of metagenomics—the study of genomic sequences—is using big data to help scientists better understand new and vast unexplored regions of the natural world: the microbiome. The Banfield Lab at UC Berkeley asked Stamen to help them bring this data to life.

Using advanced data interaction and interactive visualizations, we helped unravel these vast new landscapes of genetic diversity. Visualization is critical to understanding this vast data set. We helped Banfield to recreate this genome summary to allow them to visualize even more data simultaneously. Our visualization enabled new variations and interactions with the data, allowing Banfield to ask bigger and more comprehensive questions of these larger samples—for example, to learn which organisms in the environment contribute to carbon or nitrogen flow through the system.