Our understanding of the link between the human microbiome and disease, including
obesity, inflammatory bowel disease, arthritis and autism, is rapidly expanding …

There is increasing evidence showing that the dynamic changes in the gut microbiota can
alter brain physiology and behavior. Cognition was originally thought to be regulated only by …

Diverse microbial communities of bacteria, archaea, viruses and single-celled eukaryotes
have crucial roles in the environment and in human health. However, microbes are …

The advent of next generation sequencing (NGS) has enabled investigations of the gut
microbiome with unprecedented resolution and throughput. This has stimulated the …

Profiling phylogenetic marker genes, such as the 16S rRNA gene, is a key tool for studies of
microbial communities but does not provide direct evidence of a community's functional …

Antibiotic resistance (AR) is a global problem requiring international cooperation and
coordinated action. Global monitoring must rely on methods available and comparable …

Background The analysis of microbial communities through DNA sequencing brings many
challenges: the integration of different types of data with methods from ecology, genetics …

The past 100 years of ecological research has seen substantial progress in understanding
the natural world and likely effects of change, whether natural or anthropogenic. Traditional …

Human microbiome research is an actively develo** area of inquiry, with ramifications for
our lifestyles, our interactions with microbes, and how we treat disease. Advances depend …

For centuries ecologists have studied how the diversity and functional traits of plant and
animal communities vary across biomes. In contrast, we have only just begun exploring …