In a paper published online in advance in Genome Research this week, investigators at Washington University in St. Louis report on a method to characterize complex biomes based on in silico karyotyping, with which researchers are able to analyze "a defined representation of all DNA present in a sample." Biome representational in silico karyotyping, or BRISK as the team calls it, uses massively parallel sequencing on 27-mer DNAs per sample to deduce high-resolution karyotypes.