The Human Microbiome in Health and Disease

The application of approaches and techniques initially explored to study complex microbial communities in environments such as soil and seawater has revolutionized our thinking about our indigenous microbial communities. We are beginning to develop a greater understanding of how the microbiome can play an essential role in human health and disease. In this talk, I will briefly introduce how the development of next-generation sequencing platforms has facilitated the culture-independent study of the indigenous microbiota with a focus on studies of the gastrointestinal tract. Work that has associated the gut microbiota with various diseases states will be reviewed. This will include a discussion of association studies in patients as well as the use of animal models for mechanistic studies of how the microbiome can influence host physiology. In addition to discussing how sequence-based approaches can facilitate microbiome research, I will also include a discussion of the continued role that microbial cultivation still plays in a comprehensive study of the role of the microbiome in maintaining human health and triggering disease states.