About this Research Topic
A microbiome represents the genomic content of the microorganisms that inhabit a specific environment. It is thus easy to perceive that microbiomes are present everywhere and also in many niches of the human body. In a changing environment, microorganisms evolve and adapt, and the balance between species and clones within the community can also be disrupted or shifted to another level of steady state.
Human and other animal microbiomes can be under different sources of disturbance: physiological changes due to diet or health / illness, exposure to medications, or even environmental changes, among others. To understand and study the effect of these changes on animal microbial communities’ dynamics, the most appropriate sampling design tools must be applied, and mathematical and computational methods must also be developed to deal with this challenging subject.
With this Research Topic, we intend to address and understand the dynamics of microbial (symbiotic) communities under environmental changes. Many factors are involved in the evolution of microbiomes over time during and after the disturbance, providing information about their resilience and their ability to adapt and fit into the environment. We would like to bring together in this collection some innovative research on the evolution and dynamics of bacterial and metagenomic genomes in a changing environment. We also encourage the submission of new methods specifically tailored to address the dynamics of microbiomes in phylogenetic and functional diversity.
This Research Topic focuses on:
• The forces that trigger and drive changes in microbiomes
• The evolvability of microbiomes
• Comparing the disturbance: the before and the after
• Alpha and beta diversity of microbiomes
• Microbiomes and animal ecology and physiology
• Effect of antibiotic exposure on gut microbiome diversity and evolution
• Changes in diet and drug use and gut microbiomes
• Changes in microbiomes throughout life
• Microbiome dynamics in illness
• Effect of environmental microbial diversity on animal microbiomes
• Protocols to generate and methods for studying disturbance data
• One Health Approach to antimicrobial resistance in animal microbiomes
• Shared microbiomes and animal to human transfer
Keywords: Microbiomes, Metagenomics, Adaptation
Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.
