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Scientific information infrastructures, or cyberinfrastructures, are expected to operate over long time scales, but this creates challenges for the design of those infrastructures. This paper reports on a qualitative study of cyberinfrastructure development in the emerging field of metagenomics to illustrate some of the issues that can arise when cyberinfrastructures are faced with new scientific communities, practices, and research questions. New science inevitably brings new forms of data, new analysis tools, and the need to recontextualize existing data. Cyberinfrastructures must be prepared to adapt to the new scientific context. In this study, developers employed three strategies for addressing new scientific requirements: work-arounds, extensions, and from-scratch development. These strategies are informed by the tension between fitting the CI to the needs of a specific community and maintaining interoperability across systems.