An epidemiological view of microbial genomic data

Mark Achtman devised the acronym YATM for “yet another typing method” when assessing the huge growth in the number of approaches to classifying different microbe strains. This increase was triggered by both new technologies and by the tendency for new typing schemes to be developed for each new question. Achtman concluded that the contribution of these fragmented activities to scientific progress was low. By contrast, the scope for convergence of complementary disciplines, such as microbial evolution and epidemiology, has been described along with the capacity for this convergence to support basic scientific progress and its translation into public health benefits.