Microbial Ecology & Eco Systems

Bioinformatics for Microbiome

Microbes inhabit virtually all sites of the human body, yet we know very little about the role they play in our health. In recent years, there has been increasing interest in studying human-associated microbial communities, particularly since microbial dysbioses have now been implicated in a number of human diseases. Recent advances in sequencing technologies have made it feasible to perform large-scale studies of microbial communities, providing the tools. Rapidly developing sequencing methods and analytical techniques,  the human microbiome on different spatial and temporal scales, including daily time series datasets spanning months. Furthermore, emerging concepts related to defining operational taxonomic units, diversity indices, core versus transient microbiomes, are enhancing our ability to understand the human microbiome.