Using metagenomic 'parts lists' to infer global patterns on microbial ecology remains a significant challenge. To deduce important ecological indicators such as environmental adaptation, molecular trait dispersal, diversity variation and primary production from the gene pool of an ecosystem, we integrated 25 ocean metagenomes with geographical, meteorological and geophysicochemical data. We find that climatic factors (temperature, sunlight) are the major determinants of the biomolecular repertoire of each sample and the main limiting factor on functional trait dispersal (absence of biogeographic provincialism). Molecular functional richness and diversity show a distinct latitudinal gradient peaking at 20°N and correlate with primary production. The latter can also be predicted from the molecular functional composition of an environmental sample. Together, our results show that the functional community composition derived from metagenomes is an important quantitative readout for molecular trait-based biogeography and ecology.

The molecular understanding of phenotypes caused by drugs in humans is essential for elucidating mechanisms of action and for developing personalized medicines. Side effects of drugs (also known as adverse drug reactions) are an important source of human phenotypic information, but so far research on this topic has been hampered by insufficient accessibility of data. Consequently, we have developed a public, computer-readable side effect resource (SIDER) that connects 888 drugs to 1450 side effect terms. It contains information on frequency in patients for one-third of the drug-side effect pairs. For 199 drugs, the side effect frequency of placebo administration could also be extracted. We illustrate the potential of SIDER with a number of analyses. The resource is freely available for academic research at http://sideeffects.embl.de.