Megan (also spelled Meghan, Meagen, Meagan, Meaghan etc.) is a Welsh female name, originally a pet form of Meg or Meggie, which is itself a short form of Margaret. Megan is one of the most popular Welsh names in England and Wales, commonly truncated to Meg. Nowadays it is generally used as an independent name rather than as a nickname.
Megan was one of the most popular girls' names in the English-speaking world in the 1990s, peaking in 1990 in the United States and 1999 in the United Kingdom. Approximately 54 percent of people named Megan born in the US were born in 1990 or later.
Notable Megans include:
MEGAN ("MEtaGenome ANalyzer") is a computer program that allows optimized analysis of large metagenomic datasets.
Metagenomics is the analysis of the genomic sequences from a usually uncultured environmental sample. A large term goal of most metagenomics is to inventory and measure the extent and the role of microbial biodiversity in the ecosystem due to discoveries that the diversity of microbial organisms and viral agents in the environment is far greater than previously estimated. Tools that allow the investigation of very large data sets from environmental samples using shotgun sequencing techniques in particular, such as MEGAN, are designed to sample and investigate the unknown biodiversity of environmental samples where more precise techniques with smaller, better known samples, cannot be used.
Fragments of DNA from an metagenomics sample, such as ocean waters or soil, are compared against databases of known DNA sequences using BLAST or another sequence comparison tool to assemble the segments into discrete comparable sequences. MEGAN is then used to compare the resulting sequences with gene sequences from GenBank in NCBI. The program was used to investigate the DNA of a mammoth recovered from the Siberian permafrost and Sargasso Sea data set.