The differences in microbial composition between two studies were explained by an increased capacity of the obesity-associated microbiome to harvest energy from the diet.
Considerable further work will be required to elucidate the mechanisms underlying the observed genetic associations with microbial composition in these two studies.
31 studied microbial composition in 53 soil samples, where the relative abundance of Proteobacteria ranged between 0.2 and 0.8, with a mean of 0.54.
Molecular biology technology has contributed to further conduct the studies involving microbial composition, phylogeny, and metabolic mechanism during the whole wastewater treatment process (Al-Thukair et al. 2007; Widada et al. 2002).
These microbial composition analyses, combined with functional studies, have revealed dynamic roles of the microbiota in IBD.
Some integrated studies of microbial composition and function have provided insight into the relationship of taxonomic and functional structure and their different potential responses to environments across major global biomes such as permafrost thaw [ 21].
However, most of the studies investigating microbial composition within a specific habitat using deep sequencing analysis have focused on sampling people from the West and some Asian countries [ 26, 27, 31, 37, 38], and little is known about the overall structure and composition of the healthy Chinese microbiota.
The microbial composition data presented in this study, together with previous reports of plant polysaccharide degradation through these colonies, provides strong evidence that leaf-cutter ant colonies may play a role as natural composts in tropical ecosystems.
Yooseph et al. (2013) established a metagenomic framework for studying the microbial composition of air samples from several indoor and outdoor environments, and successfully identified highly diverse microbial communities with genes involved in metabolism, transport, translation, and signal transduction.
However, these studies only reveal the microbes that can be cultured and these most likely do not reflect the complete microbial composition of the carp gut since studies on mammals have shown that most members of the microbiota in the GI tract cannot be cultured when removed from the gut (Suau et al. 1999; Moya et al. 2008).
