Analysis of gut microbiota - An ever changing landscape

摘要

Over the last decade great advances have been made in our understanding of the structure, function, and ecology of microorganisms in natural systems, microbial community structure in a variety of habitats, and host- and microbe-microbe interactions.1'2 These advances have been achieved, in large part, by the development of molecular tools, chiefly next-generation DNA sequencing technologies,3 that allow for the determination of microbial taxa without the need for culture, as well as bioinformatic tools to process the billions of DNA sequences generated from these technologies.4'5 These technologies not only overcome issues related to the "great plate count anomaly," in which <1% of microbial species in some matrices are able to be cultured in vitro,6 but provide unprecedented understanding of the complexity of numerous microbial systems, many of which were previously passed-over as overly complicated or simplified because of methodological limitations. Recently, however, more gut microbiota have been cultivated and there have been reports of the use of a variety of laboratory media and growth conditions, both aerobic and anaerobic, to culture a large number of microbial species identified by DNA-based methods.7"8