In the last years, the microbiome has been widely studied and linked to multiple diseases and conditions, as well as diet, lifestyle, and environmental factors. A particular effort to study these aspects was dedicated to the human gut microbiome both based on amplicon and shotgun sequencing technologies. A thinner body of literature focused on shedding light on the structures and functions of microbial communities associated with different hosts. However, methods to analyze microbiomes, either cultivation-based or cultivation-free, allow profiling only a fraction of the total microbial community. This is especially true for non-human hosts, and when considering the functional aspects.
As a consequence, much of the microbiome structure and function linked with lifestyle and environmental factors are still poorly characterized. Many microbiome members are indeed still phenotypically uncharacterized by cultivation analysis, and so are their functional traits. Moreover, even from a computational perspective, the lack of easy-to-use pipelines and of fully-annotated databases makes the study of the functional side of microbiomes challenging. Nevertheless, the increasing availability of genomes retrieved from microbial communities through metagenomic assembly, culturomics, and isolation-based studies is easing the study of the fraction of microbial communities not described by genomes available in public databases. However, research is needed to better understand the role of lifestyle and environmental factors on the structure and functional potential and activity of the microbial communities.
The scope of this Research Topic is to unveil functions and structures of microbial communities that are linked to lifestyles and environments in different host species. Studies specifically looking at these links could shed more light on how lifestyle and the environment shape the microbiome, potentially influencing the host physiology. The scope of this Research Topic could be achieved through both research and review articles defining and validating new and previous results, also focusing on the reproducibility among different cohorts.
In the last years, the microbiome has been widely studied and linked to multiple diseases and conditions, as well as diet, lifestyle, and environmental factors. A particular effort to study these aspects was dedicated to the human gut microbiome both based on amplicon and shotgun sequencing technologies. A thinner body of literature focused on shedding light on the structures and functions of microbial communities associated with different hosts. However, methods to analyze microbiomes, either cultivation-based or cultivation-free, allow profiling only a fraction of the total microbial community. This is especially true for non-human hosts, and when considering the functional aspects.
As a consequence, much of the microbiome structure and function linked with lifestyle and environmental factors are still poorly characterized. Many microbiome members are indeed still phenotypically uncharacterized by cultivation analysis, and so are their functional traits. Moreover, even from a computational perspective, the lack of easy-to-use pipelines and of fully-annotated databases makes the study of the functional side of microbiomes challenging. Nevertheless, the increasing availability of genomes retrieved from microbial communities through metagenomic assembly, culturomics, and isolation-based studies is easing the study of the fraction of microbial communities not described by genomes available in public databases. However, research is needed to better understand the role of lifestyle and environmental factors on the structure and functional potential and activity of the microbial communities.
The scope of this Research Topic is to unveil functions and structures of microbial communities that are linked to lifestyles and environments in different host species. Studies specifically looking at these links could shed more light on how lifestyle and the environment shape the microbiome, potentially influencing the host physiology. The scope of this Research Topic could be achieved through both research and review articles defining and validating new and previous results, also focusing on the reproducibility among different cohorts.
