On a recent trip to the Natural History Museum, London, the subject of DNA barcoding came up, and I got the clear impression that people at the NHM thought classical DNA barcoding was pretty much irrelevant, given recent developments in sequencing technology. For example, why sequence just COI when you can use shotgun sequencing to get the whole mitogenome? I was a little taken aback, although this is a view that's getting some traction, e.g.

A paper published in Nature Biotechnology today reveals the most comprehensive catalogue of genes in any single microbiome to date. While the roughly 20,000 genes in the human genome have been available for over a decade, the gene catalogue of the microbiome, our much larger “other genome” has to date been much more poorly understood and characterized.

Visualizations are becoming increasing important to graphically illustrate, understand, and glean insight from the explosion of larger and larger datasets in this supposed era of “big data”. Microbial ecology and the study of the microbiome is revolutionizing how we look at health, microorganism diversity and ecological interactions, but these studies are proving challenging to deal with the ever-expanding numbers of specimens sampled.