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The ecological landscape of microbiome science

Nature Biotechnology volume 35, pages 1047–1049 (2017)Cite this article

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Two reports examine the sources of variation in methods for analyzing microbial communities.

Microbial communities, also known as microbiomes, shape planetary ecosystems and influence the health of humans, plants, and animals1,2. The ability to study the genomic composition of microbiomes depends on high-throughput DNA sequencing of entire communities. These genomic methods present many technical and analytical challenges and vary widely between laboratories. In this issue, papers from two consortia examine the inter-laboratory variability in various aspects of microbiome data generation. Work by Costea et al.3, focuses on characterizing and optimizing DNA extraction from human microbiome samples. The second paper, by Sinha et al.4, describes the initial phase of the Microbiome Quality Control Project (MBQC), which characterizes the extent of variability in the full microbiome processing workflow, from DNA extraction to data analysis.

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  1. Daryl M. Gohl is at the University of Minnesota Genomics Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA.,

    Daryl M Gohl

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  1. Daryl M Gohl
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Correspondence to Daryl M Gohl.

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D.M.G. is a shareholder and CSO of CoreBiome, Inc.

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Gohl, D. The ecological landscape of microbiome science. Nat Biotechnol 35, 1047–1049 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.3983

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