One of the most useful has proven to be the community profiling technique known as denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis (DGGE), a method used extensively by microbial ecologists for the study of environmental communities [18], [19].
The wealth of community genomic information allows microbial ecologists to explore the enormous genetic diversity contained within different microbial habitats.
This data gush has forced computational microbial ecologists to re-factor software tools to make the analysis of these datasets feasible.
Given the abundance of phages and potential impact of phage-mediated selection on bacterial populations, there is growing interest among microbial ecologists to understand the coevolutionary processes underlying interactions between bacteria and lytic phages.
It is our intent to provide microbial ecologists with knowledge of many of the tools available for built environment data collection, as well as some of the constraints and considerations for these tools, which may improve our ability to design indoor microbial ecology studies that can better inform building design and operation.
One of the main goals of microbial ecologists is to assess the contribution of distinct bacterial groups to biogeochemical processes, e.g. carbon cycling.
So microbial ecologists Matthew Whiteside and Kathleen Treseder, both of the University of California, Irvine, set out to find a way to see the nutrient flow in the soil itself.
As microbial ecologists take advantage of high-throughput analytical techniques to describe microbial communities across ever-increasing numbers of samples, the need for new analysis tools that reveal the intrinsic spatial patterns and structures of these populations is crucial.
As microbial ecologists take advantage of high-throughput sequencing technologies to describe microbial communities across ever-increasing numbers of samples, new analysis tools are required to relate the distribution of microbes among larger numbers of communities, and to use increasingly rich and standards-compliant metadata to understand the biological factors driving these relationships.
To test this idea, a team of microbial ecologists and plant physiologists at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Edgewater, Maryland, subjected a scrub oak ecosystem in Florida to twice the current level of atmospheric carbon dioxide for 6 years.
