Less than 1% of all microorganisms of the available environmental microbiota can be cultured with the currently available techniques. Metagenomics is a new methodology of high-throughput DNA sequencing, able to provide taxonomic and functional profiles of microbial communities without the necessity to culture microbes in the laboratory. Metagenomics opens to a 'hypothesis-free' approach, giving important details for future research and treatment of ocular diseases in ophthalmology, such as ocular infection and ocular surface diseases.
Keywords: cornea; eye; metagenomics; microbiome; ocular surface; ophthalmology; sequencing.