Microbiome - Introduction

Introduction

All plants and animals, from protists to humans, live in close association with microbial organisms, cf. the human microbiome. Up until relatively recently, however, the interactions of plants and animals with the microbial world have been defined mostly in the context of disease states and a relatively small number of symbiotic case studies. Organisms do not live in isolation, but have evolved in the context of complex communities. A number of advances have driven a change in this perception, which include, notably, the current ease of performing genomic and gene expression analyses of single cells and even entire microbial communities in the new disciplines of metagenomics and metatranscriptonomics, along with massive databases enabling this information to be accessible to researchers across multiple disciplines, and methods of mathematical analysis that enable sense to be made of complex data sets. It has become increasingly appreciated that microbes play an important part of an organism's phenotype, far beyond the occasional symbiotic case study.

An organism's complement of microbial inhabitants has been called a "forgotten organ".