Welcome!

Soil Metagenomics 2010 took place with approx. 210 participants from 34 countries in Braunschweig in December 2010. An objective of this Symposium was to open our minds to the new potentials of next generation sequencing, to question our traditional approaches, and to explore and discuss how we can utilize those novel datasets. It was discussed which topics we can we now address in soil ecology and how can we approach the problems of scales to further unveil the secrets of the huge microbial diversity that we find on Earth.

FEMS Microbiology Ecology will publish a thematic issue on Soil Metagenomics. The issue editors James I. Prosser, Kornelia Smalla, Folker Meyer, and Christoph C. Tebbe invite you to contribute manuscripts. Submission of manuscripts is open on the journal's website until JANUARY 31, 2011. Authors submitting manuscripts should state in their covering letter that their article is for the Soil Metagenomics thematic issue.

I thank all participants of the meeting for their great contributions and I hope that the Symposium was inspiring for their future research. I greatly appreciate the support of the staff of the Johann-Heinrich von Thünen-Institute (vTI) (www.vti.bund.de) and of the German Science Foundation DFG (www.dfg.de) which made this meeting possible. Finally I would like to thank the conference agency Conventus for the perfect and outstanding technical organization.

Christoph C. Tebbe
Symposium organiser