annotations are not updated and thus become inconsistent with new ones. Although there is now a mechanism (called third party annotation¹⁸) for the community to annotate genomic sequences in GenBank, EMBL-Bank, and DDBJ, the original authors’ annotations, even if outdated, remain as primary annotations seen in the database. For instance, annotations added through curation at the appropriate model organism database are only very slowly being incorporated into central databases. In metagenomics projects, where many types of annotations would become possible only after additional data (or metadata) are collected by other groups, an annotation database must be able to accept and integrate both individual and large-scale (computational) annotations of metagenomic data and able to integrate them in a transparent way for their user communities. The need for dynamic and flexible annotation will require ongoing, professional curation—another reason that long-term database funding will be important.

It will be seen that the scientific community will be presented with challenges by the generation of metagenomics data. Many of the challenges will require a high degree of community organization and collaboration. Given the wide array of microbial communities that will be studied—from toxic waste sites to agricultural soil to the human mouth—the interested scientific community will be extremely diverse, and coordination will be