microbiome analysis is the study of the microbial communities in and on humans and other organisms, including plants and animals. Sample collections of microbes from individuals are used to determine in what environments an individual lives, their interactions with these environments, how they change over time, and more. The term microbiome analysis refers to microbial communities that shape an organism's physiology through a combination of interactions with the present environment. The skin is one such example; it hosts approximately 1014 bacterial cells representing about 600 species (and additional unclassified taxa).
The term microbiome was coined in 1999 by Darlene Francis and Martin Blaser, at Cornell University Medical College, as a portmanteau of the words "microbiome" and "phyla". The new term described the microbial communities in and on the human host. Since then, it has been applied to any community of microbial organisms that is found in or on a host organism. The concept of the microbiome analysis is broad, and has been used to study microbial communities in humans, animals, plants, and other organisms.
Contrary to the common use of the term "microbiome analysis" in the press and popular media that often focuses on the gastrointestinal tract as a microbiome site only within a human host, scientists use this term as referring to microbes on or in other hosts (including animals) as well. It is clear that each host has its own unique set of microbial ecology. Microbiome analysis of soil, plants, animals, and humans demonstrates that these communities are remarkably similar. Many of the same types of bacteria and other microbes colonize all these hosts. The size and makeup of the microbial communities in each host are largely dependent on the host's habitat or environment.
The term microbiome has also been used as a synonym for taxonomic meaning revealing a mixture of species within an ecosystem or natural habitat; this usage is primarily used in ecology studies addressing microbial diversity from local to global scales in marine and terrestrial systems.
Microbiome analysis
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