• Meta genomics bypasses this issue by sequencing all the DNA in a given sample, capturing a more comprehensive view of the microbial community. (nature.com)
  • In meta genomics, machine learning can be used to identify patterns and correlations in large datasets, helping us to understand the structure and function of microbial communities. (nature.com)
  • Advances in genomics and metagenomics are expected to provide deeper insights into marine microbial communities and their biotechnological applications. (medgadget.com)
  • Over the years I have participated in diverse research projects involving metagenomics and prokaryotic genomics but my main focus has always been on aquatic systems, especially on soda lakes. (slu.se)
  • Microbial ecology, metagenomics and prokaryotic genomics. (slu.se)
  • Topics broadly addressing the study of microbial communities, such as, meta-genomics surveys, bioinformatics, other '-omics' approaches and surveys, and community/host interaction mathematical modeling will be covered. (eurekalert.org)
  • Research at the intersection of biological and microbial oceanography and functional genomics. (ucsd.edu)
  • Silver Age of GOLD Introduces New Features The Genomes OnLine Database makes curated microbiome metadata that follows community standards freely available and enables large-scale comparative genomics analysis initiatives. (doe.gov)
  • Final Round of 2022 CSP Functional Genomics Awardees Meet the final six researchers whose proposals were selected for the 2022 Community Science Program Functional Genomics call. (doe.gov)
  • Genome-resolved metagenomics and metatranscriptomics were utilized to describe an active microbial community containing novel metagenome-assembled genomes and dominated by sulfur-cycling Desulfobacterota and Gammaproteobacteria . (biomedcentral.com)
  • The PhD candidate will obtain sediment samples and isolate DNA to determine the microbial community composition using 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing and genome-resolved metagenomics analyses. (fems-microbiology.org)
  • To improve the quality and reproducibility of microbiomics analyses, Zymo Research has endeavored to develop microbial reference materials. (zymoresearch.com)
  • Microbiome will facilitate the cross-fertilization of ideas, research methods and analyses, and theory between clinical and environmental microbiologists exploring the emergent impacts of microbial communities on the ecosystems they inhabit," says Wommack, a University of Delaware professor who researches the inner workings of microbial communities. (eurekalert.org)
  • 2011) indicate that taxonomic composition is relatively unchanged under nutrient addition in salt marsh communities, our metagenomic analyses identified a clear difference in the abundance of functional genes related to nutrient metabolism. (brown.edu)
  • This enables fine-grained analyses of the functions of microbial community members, and the study of their association with phenotypes and environments, as well as studies of microevolution and adaptation to changing environmental conditions. (helmholtz-hzi.de)
  • Savage, D.C. Microbial ecology of the gastrointestinal tract. (nature.com)
  • A 3-year postdoctoral fellowship in microbial bioinformatics is available in the Microbial Interactions Research Group based at the Section for Microbial Ecology and Biotechnology and located at the Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences , Faculty of Science, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. (fems-microbiology.org)
  • It can be used to explore the diversity, function, and ecology of microbial communities. (bioinformatics.ca)
  • Applying this approach to human and animal environments, both internal (e.g., gut microbiomes) and external (e.g., hospitals, farms) offers new insights into microbial ecology and evolution. (cdc.gov)
  • We study the metabolism, physiology, and evolutionary ecology of microbial symbioses and uncultured microorganisms. (ncsu.edu)
  • Understanding how microbial communities are assembled and how the presence or absence of species is related to that of others are central goals of microbial ecology. (peerj.com)
  • This form of research gives us a window into the diverse microbial communities inhabiting various ecosystems, from the human gut to the deepest ocean trenches. (nature.com)
  • Because it can be applied to environmental samples, the approach we present is broadly applicable to measuring population growth, mortality, and associated biogeochemical process rates of microbial taxa for a wide range of ecosystems and can help reveal how individual microbial populations drive biogeochemical fluxes. (osti.gov)
  • The application of next-generation sequencing technology in microbial community analysis increased our knowledge and understanding of the complexity and diversity of a variety of ecosystems. (frontiersin.org)
  • Biofilms are complex, highly dynamic, structured ecosystems formed by a community of different microorganisms living attached to inert or living surfaces and embedded in a matrix designated extracellular polymeric substance (EPS). (intechopen.com)
  • Genome Insider: Methane Makers in Yosemite's Lakes Meet researchers who sampled the microbial communities living in the mountaintop lakes of the Sierra Nevada mountains to see how climate change affects freshwater ecosystems, and how those ecosystems work. (doe.gov)
  • Given the wide-ranging roles microbes play in many ecosystems, metagenomics studies of microbial communities will reveal insights into protein families and their evolution. (sindark.com)
  • Comparisons of microbial communities among similar environmental samples using 16S amplicon sequencing and functional metagenomics have been met with mixed results, lending support for both neutral and functional responses in communities. (brown.edu)
  • We used a combination of shotgun metagenomic sequencing and functional metagenomics to quantitatively interrogate taxonomic and ARG compositional variation on farm s. (cdc.gov)
  • 16S rRNA gene data derived from a shotgun metagenome of the same reactor sample added an additional perspective on the community structure. (frontiersin.org)
  • Overall our results indicate a rather limited comparability between community structures investigated and determined using different primer pairs as well as between metagenome and 16S rRNA gene amplicon based community structure analysis. (frontiersin.org)
  • In this study, using faecal samples from patients with IBD, we show through diversity analysis of the microbial community structure based on the 16S rRNA gene that the gut microbiome of IBD patients is less diverse compared to healthy individuals. (springer.com)
  • These proof-of-concept experiments support the utility of using spike-in controls with a unique 16S rRNA tag to monitor the full process from DNA extraction to data analysis of a microbiome workflow for both 16S rRNA and shotgun metagenomics assays. (atcc.org)
  • Communities of microorganisms participate in and drive a variety of biochemical processes that have significant impact on the environment around them. (usda.gov)
  • Currently I am working on a comparative metagenomic analysis to characterize biogeography, diversity and evolutionary origin of keystone soda lake microorganisms and to estimate the communities' contribution to the global carbon budget. (slu.se)
  • The new publication reflects the growing importance of the need for studying communities of microorganisms - microbiomes - and their functions in their natural environment whether that environment is the human body, the ocean, or any other habitat. (eurekalert.org)
  • Thus shotgun metagenomics and subsequent analysis, which facilitates the recovery of the genomes of microorganisms without prior cultivation, has become a powerful tool to study the microbes found in many biomes. (researchsquare.com)
  • Much of Pop's research focuses on the analysis of microbial communities-a scientific field called metagenomics-which involves the application of bioinformatics tools to study the genetic material from environmental, uncultured microorganisms. (umd.edu)
  • Several other microorganisms come after entering in this very competitive ecosystem where quorum sensing and antibiotic resistance are determinants in the development of the community. (intechopen.com)
  • Despite the widespread availability of microbial genome data-close to 2,000 microbes have been and are being decoded to date-a vast unknown realm awaits scientists intent on exploring microorganisms that inhabit this "undiscovered country. (doe.gov)
  • We collected metagenomic data from multiple sites along the two creeks and compared our results with studies of microbial community structures based on 16S rDNA amplicon sequencing, in which a single taxonomically informative locus is used to identify the taxonomic composition of a community (Sogin et al. (brown.edu)
  • His lab develops efficient computational methods for analyzing DNA sequencing data, including tools for genome assembly, genome alignment, genome clustering, microbial forensics, and metagenomics. (agbt.org)
  • Tips for a Winning Community Science Program Proposal In the Genome Insider podcast, tips to successfully avail of the JGI's proposal calls, many through the Community Science Program. (doe.gov)
  • Metagenomics provides detection of phage genome sequences in various microbial communities. (bvsalud.org)
  • For instance, machine learning algorithms are used to predict antibiotic resistance genes in bacterial communities. (nature.com)
  • When summed across the entire bacterial community, our taxon-specific estimates are within the range of other whole-assemblage measurements of bacterial turnover. (osti.gov)
  • Here, we evaluated Arabidopsis thaliana mutants with defects in different parts of the immune system for an altered bacterial community assembly using a gnotobiotic system. (nature.com)
  • This is problematic given that biological diversity is a key metric when studying the impact of a bacterial community on its surrounding environment and aberrations of this quantity have been implicated in a number of diseases. (usda.gov)
  • Three archaeal 16S primer pairs as well as two bacterial and one general microbial 16S primer pairs were comprehensively tested by in-silico evaluation and performing an experimental analysis of a complex microbial community of a biogas reactor. (frontiersin.org)
  • The gut microbiota, which has a complex community of a hundred trillion bacterial and archaeal cells comprising more than a thousand species, provides benefits to the host such as short-chain fatty acids (SCFA) and amino acids, metabolism of undigested carbohydrate, and stimulation of the immune system [ 19 , 20 ]. (springer.com)
  • These inventories are providing insight into complex bacterial communities, but they "lose the basic unit: the cell," says Quake. (technologyreview.com)
  • Single-cell sequencing efforts will greatly expand microbiologists' understanding of the complex bacterial communities living in our bodies, says Anthony Chow , emeritus professor of medicine at the University of British Columbia. (technologyreview.com)
  • In mice, the composition of bacterial communities has been linked to body weight and health. (technologyreview.com)
  • Through the service and infrastructure activities the group has also been involved in several other projects, like research on prokaryotes, including oil well metagenomics, biodegradation, pathogenic bacteria, and characterization of novel bacterial genes. (ntnu.edu)
  • I have written my doctoral thesis about the seasonality of soda lakes' planktonic bacterial communities and also participated in several sampling campaigns in Eurasia. (slu.se)
  • Thesis title: Comparative genomic analysis of soda lake planktonic bacterial communities under changing environmental conditions. (slu.se)
  • To demonstrate the utility of these spike-in controls in microbiome research, we conducted studies where we mixed them with whole-cell or gDNA mock communities containing different bacterial strains at various ratios. (atcc.org)
  • Discovery of new bacterial species shows little sign of abating, demonstrating the continued need to improve the experimental methods and informatics tooling used to produce metagenome assembled genomes (MAGs) thereby allowing the full microbial diversity to be described. (researchsquare.com)
  • combined with metagenomics has uncovered thousands of novel bacterial species directly from samples without isolation or culturing. (helmholtz-hzi.de)
  • As CLIMB comes to an end, we propose a unique new partnership--CLIMB-BIG-DATA (Cloud Infrastructure for Big-Data Microbial Bioinformatics)- to meet the bioinformatic needs of the UK microbiology community as we head into the 2020s. (ukri.org)
  • Activities aimed at community engagement will include bioinformatics workshops, hackathons and symposia. (ukri.org)
  • The CLIMB-BIG-DATA partnership will provide a substantial computational resource that will enhance UK capability and infrastructure in microbial bioinformatics, building on our highly successful CLIMB project. (ukri.org)
  • The infrastructure also assists with access to compute clusters suitable for various bioinformatics needs in the research community including compute and storage of sensitive data. (lu.se)
  • Traditional microbiology relies on isolating and culturing individual species, a method that cannot capture the full diversity of microbial life since many microbes are impossible to culture in the lab. (nature.com)
  • It can predict the presence or absence of certain microbial species based on environmental factors, or even identify novel genes or metabolic pathways. (nature.com)
  • While much attention has been given to the prokaryotic species and their functional capacity 2 - 4 , microbial eukaryotes such as fungi also perform key roles in many environments, for example by making carbon available and by creating new environments 5 . (researchsquare.com)
  • Even if cultivation were possible, isolation of all microbial species would be problematic due to the sheer number of species involved 6 . (researchsquare.com)
  • However, most microbial species from a given habitat cannot be cultured and thus cannot be experimentally characterized in the laboratory. (ncsu.edu)
  • We are looking for a highly motivated and curiosity-driven PhD candidate with an interest in microbiology, specifically on the integration of various 'omics' approaches (metagenomics, transcriptomics, proteomics) to study the microbial physiology of prokaryotes in anoxic marine and hot spring sediments. (fems-microbiology.org)
  • Metagenomics is an emerging method for describing microbial communities by sequencing all the genomes present within a clinical or environmental sample. (cdc.gov)
  • The $2.6 million award is supporting Pop's work building software and developing algorithms that can reconstruct nearly-complete microbial genomes from complex mixtures found in the human gut. (umd.edu)
  • But with two projects, communities are forming to generate high quality genomes to benefit researchers. (doe.gov)
  • We use sequence-based approaches, flow cytometry, modeling, and other techniques to explore the structure and function of microbial communities. (ucsd.edu)
  • One context in which the function of microbial communities has important environmental implications is in estuaries, where microbial communities act as an intermediate between human nutrient and pollution runoff and marine systems This nutrient runoff can have profound implications for fisheries, water quality, and human health (Belkin & Colwell 2006). (brown.edu)
  • Vast and complex microbial communities teem on and inside our bodies. (technologyreview.com)
  • Pop also leads efforts to assemble data at the Human Microbiome Project , which is aimed at surveying the complex microbial communities inhabiting the human body. (umd.edu)
  • However, the inability to measure population-specific rates, such as growth, for microbial taxa within natural assemblages has limited ecologists' understanding of how microbial populations interact to regulate ecosystem processes. (osti.gov)
  • Our comparison of microbial communities in salt marsh sediments along a polluted and unpolluted creek reveal a clear role for both processes, with strong functional differences in the abundance of metabolic genes related to nutrient cycling that are spread randomly across a range of functionally redundant taxa. (brown.edu)
  • Shotgun metagenomics provides access to genetic information of microbes in a culture-independent manner. (researchsquare.com)
  • Using shotgun sequencing paired with functional metagenomics, we showed that microbial community composition changed between fresh manure and manure pit samples with a decrease in gut-associated pathobionts, while ARG abundance and diversity remained high. (cdc.gov)
  • Figure 1: Phylum-level microbial composition of ancient dental calculus deposits. (nature.com)
  • While higher-order mutants in receptors that recognize microbial features and in defence hormone signalling showed substantial microbial community alterations, the absence of the plant NADPH oxidase RBOHD caused the most pronounced change in the composition of the leaf microbiota. (nature.com)
  • The microbial standard is a well-defined, accurately characterized mock community consisting of Gram-negative and Gram-positive bacteria and yeast with varying sizes and cell wall composition. (zymoresearch.com)
  • Metagenomics has also been used to address the composition and biology of holobionts, such as corals and sponges, and their associated microbiome 8 , 9 . (researchsquare.com)
  • Neutral theory postulates that the composition of biological communities is determined by stochastic processes only. (peerj.com)
  • However, field soil communities were distinct from those in manure in both microbial taxonomic and ARG composition. (cdc.gov)
  • By applying this model to phylogenetic marker sequencing data collected from stable-isotope probing studies, we estimate rates of growth, mortality, and turnover for individual microbial populations within soil assemblages. (osti.gov)
  • Soil health and water infrastructure measures needed to restore wheat production in Pakistan, in rural communities devastated by major flooding. (cimmyt.org)
  • This metagenomics study examines how application of organic material alters soil microbial populations and functionality in soil from permanent beds with residue retention. (cimmyt.org)
  • First, we will test a wide range of individual microbial strainsas well as naturally-occurring soil biota for the ability to induce MDH. (ncsu.edu)
  • Manure microbial communities and resistance profiles reconfigure after transition to manure pits and differ from those in fertilized field soil. (cdc.gov)
  • Further, we did not find evidence of shared microbial community or a transfer of ARGs between manure and field soil microbiomes. (cdc.gov)
  • We did not find evidence of taxonomic or ARG restructuring of soil microbiota with the application of manure to field soils, as soil communities remained resilient to manure-induced perturbation. (cdc.gov)
  • IMPORTANCE: The addition of dairy cow manure - stored in manure pits - to field soil has the potential to introduce not only organic nutrients but also mammalian microbial communities and antimicrobial resistance genes (ARGs) to soil communities. (cdc.gov)
  • These results broaden our understanding of the transfer of microbial communities in agricultur al settings and suggest that field soil microbial communities are resilient against the deposition of ARGs or microbial communities from manure. (cdc.gov)
  • Given that we live in a microbial world, it may be time for new metaphors, replacing the "arms race," battles, and outright war against microbes with better intelligence, longer-term strategies, and more enlightened negotiations. (cdc.gov)
  • The complexity of these mixed communities can not easily be approached using traditional isolation methods, as many of these microbes are fastidious and elude cultivation. (researchsquare.com)
  • Second, we will map the genetic architecture of MDH to identify genomic loci whose effect on heterosis is dependent on the microbial environment, and test for a genetic correlation with loci underlying resistance to a variety of pathogenic microbes in the field. (ncsu.edu)
  • In contrast to neutral models, which predict random community assemblage, these results provide clear support for a role of the functional niche that microbes occupy in determining their abundance in sediments. (brown.edu)
  • Research interests combine fundamental investigations of molecular-scale microbial processes that transform metals and field-based research to further our understanding of the role of microbes in contaminant mobility in the environment. (epfl.ch)
  • Because most microbes will not grow in the laboratory using current cultivation techniques, scientists have turned to cultivation-independent techniques to study microbial diversity. (sindark.com)
  • Oct 2022: The new section 'Environmental Metagenomics' of the Research Center One Health is launched. (uni-due.de)
  • Anoxic sediments host a wide diversity of microbial groups that are poorly characterized. (fems-microbiology.org)
  • Oct 2023: The section 'Environmental Metagenomics' receives the ERC Synergy Award. (uni-due.de)
  • A mock microbial DNA community standard allows researchers to focus the optimization after the step of DNA extraction. (zymoresearch.com)
  • This mock microbial community can be used in the optimization of metagenomics workflows and microbiome research applications, improving the consistency of data run after run. (atcc.org)
  • To this end we develop and use cultivation-independent approaches such as metagenomics, metaproteomics, and metabolomics, as well as more targeted approaches such as enzyme assays, single-cell imaging methods, and stable isotope-based experiments. (ncsu.edu)
  • Microbial communities are comprised of a diverse assemblage of taxonomic groups and metabolic functions that carry out important ecosystem processes such as nutrient cycling. (brown.edu)
  • We found that as the microbiome transitions from fresh dairy cow manure to manure pits, microbial taxonomic compositions and resistance profiles experience distinct restructuring, including decreases in alpha diversity and shifts in specific ARG abundances that potentially correspond to fresh manure going from a gut-structured community to an environment-structured community. (cdc.gov)
  • Another approach to studying unculturable microbial communities, called metagenomics, is to create an inventory of a community's genes. (technologyreview.com)
  • The recent success gut microbial genes, obtained after has fantastic potential, it has only of faecal microbiota transplantation, sequencing whole faecal microbiota been about 10 years since the sci- especially in the context of Clostridi- metagenomes from 124 European indi- entific community first realized its im- um difficile infection, argues for such viduals [4]. (who.int)
  • Microbial communities are ubiquitous in all environments on Earth that support life, and they play crucial roles in global biogeochemical cycles, plant and animal health, and biotechnological processes. (ncsu.edu)
  • The environmental and ecological processes that shape microbial community structure have been of long-standing interest to microbial ecologists. (brown.edu)
  • Comparative metagenomic studies yielded the surprising result that individual cattle possess markedly different community structures, predicted phenotype, and metabolic potentials, even though they were fed identical diets, were housed together, and were apparently functionally identical in their utilization of plant cell wall resources. (wikipedia.org)
  • Fig. 1: Characterization of the At -LSPHERE model community in the phyllosphere and endosphere of A. thaliana . (nature.com)
  • Viruses, far from being just parasites affecting hosts' fitness, are major players in any microbial ecosystem. (mdpi.com)
  • Thus, the way in which microbial communities respond to nutrient loading has important consequences for better understanding human impacts on ecosystem function and nutrient cycling. (brown.edu)
  • The rapidly emerging field of metagenomics seeks to examine the genomic content of communities of organisms to understand their roles and interactions in an ecosystem. (sindark.com)
  • The colonic microbiome view is controversial, some people Metagenomics of the Human Intes- is the most diverse and also the best consider the gut microbiota to be tinal Tract (MetaHIT) consortium re- characterized microbial community. (who.int)
  • Under healthy conditions, the in- nomes obtained from individuals crobiota resembles the mother's skin testinal microbiota is considered to on three continents, including 760 microbial community, composed of be a stable community, influenced samples from Europe. (who.int)
  • Most current approaches to this so-called community profiling problem take a parsimonious approach: infer the presence of the fewest organisms possible that still agrees with the observed data. (usda.gov)
  • Many tools and approaches have been proposed to profile microbial communities, and while these tools take advantage of particular properties of microbial genetics to perform the classification task, there is a general lack of rigorous mathematical approaches that allow for definitive statements to be made about such classifications. (usda.gov)
  • In parallel, the PhD candidate will isolate community RNA and proteins from these sediment layers, which will be analysed using transcriptomics and proteomics approaches. (fems-microbiology.org)
  • These metagenomic studies have been central to our understanding of microbial communities from both functional and genomic perspectives. (researchsquare.com)
  • One of the first questions to ask when studying such a community is: 'which organisms are present and at what abundance? (usda.gov)
  • Microorganismal community profiling, determining the identity and relative abundance of all microbial organisms present in a given environmental sample through their sequenced DNA, is an important first step in the study of such communities. (usda.gov)
  • In spite of their broad abundance, viruses, in particular bacteriophages, remain largely unknown since only about 20% of sequences obtained from viral community DNA surveys could be annotated by comparison with public databases. (mdpi.com)
  • The student would further develop a metagenomics pipeline to compare abundance of different microbial symbionts between larvae feeding on their preferred and unpreferred host plant. (lu.se)
  • After advancing the mathematical theory, the investigators will create a software implementation that will allow biomedical researchers to study metagenomic communities while properly accounting for varying organism similarity. (usda.gov)
  • The central purpose of Microbiome is to unite investigators conducting research on microbial communities in environmental, agricultural, and biomedical arenas. (eurekalert.org)
  • This will result in an optimization framework that allows for simultaneously profiling a microbial community and characterizing its biodiversity directly while considering organism similarity. (usda.gov)
  • To cite MGnify, please refer to the following publication: EBI Metagenomics in 2017: enriching the analysis of microbial communities, from sequence reads to assemblies. (gbif.org)
  • In this project, the investigators leverage a recently defined, unifying notion of biological diversity to address the problem of correctly profiling a microbial community which has in it organisms of varying similarity. (usda.gov)
  • Furthermore, the estimated biological diversity of a community can vary widely depending on the computational approach used. (usda.gov)
  • In this project, the PIs utilize this definition of biodiversity to develop a rigorous mathematical approach to simultaneously profile a microbial community and characterize its biological diversity. (usda.gov)
  • Microbial communities and their ecological relationships of extreme aquatic environments within the Carpathian Basin (Central Europe). (slu.se)
  • Co-occurrence patterns between organisms can reveal ecological associations that take place between the members of a community. (peerj.com)
  • Our ability to understand the enigmatic microbial world has been vastly amplified by advancements in meta genomic data analysis. (nature.com)
  • In contrast to Bacteria, the archaeal domain was often not particularly addressed in the analysis of microbial communities. (frontiersin.org)
  • Metagenomics, the sequencing of DNA directly from a sample without first culturing and isolating the organisms, has become the principal tool of "meta-omic" analysis. (bioinformatics.ca)
  • Despite the promise of these technologies, the analysis of metagenomic data remains challenging due to the technical biases introduced throughout the metagenomics workflow-from sample preparation to bioinformatic analysis. (atcc.org)
  • In-depth resistome analysis by targeted metagenomics. (cdc.gov)
  • Deep learning algorithms can even predict how a microbial community might respond to changes in its environment, providing crucial insights for fields such as climate change research and personalized medicine. (nature.com)
  • For example, deep learning has been used to predict the functional potential of microbial communities from their DNA sequences. (nature.com)
  • The microbiome is the community of bacteria and fungi that are associated with different environments, including the surface, digestive tract, or other organs of multicellular organisms. (lu.se)
  • A community of practice (CoP) was established by the Centre for Social Development in Africa to promote collaboration between the sectors and to assist communities in their environments. (bvsalud.org)
  • Metagenomics is the study of such microbial communities through their extracted DNA. (usda.gov)
  • Further, the natural complexity of microbial communities themselves has challenged microbiome researchers in their ability to make meaningful, quantifiable, reproducible, and comparable measurements across different laboratories. (atcc.org)
  • We are a community of more than 103,000 authors and editors from 3,291 institutions spanning 160 countries, including Nobel Prize winners and some of the world's most-cited researchers. (intechopen.com)
  • Cow Rumen and the Early Days of Metagenomics Tracing a cow rumen dataset from the lab to material for a hands-on undergraduate research course at CSU-San Marcos that has since expanded into three other universities. (doe.gov)
  • We identified a rare surficial chemolithoautotrophic, sulfur-cycling microbial community active in a unique anoxic, cold, hypersaline Arctic spring. (biomedcentral.com)
  • Biofilms are a mixture of complex communities of organisms mostly composed of diverse bacteria that vary depending on the surrounding environmental conditions induced by physical and chemical factors. (intechopen.com)