Microbial ecology in the era of NGS technology

Abstract

Due to the advanced sequencing environment led by so-called NGS (next generation sequencing) technology, microbial ecology meets a new era to understand the natural environments directly. High throughput and cheap sequencing technologies made meta-omics technologies become available to many ecologists. The first important part of the ecology is to know what kind of organisms constitute the ecosystems. For this purpose, marker genes such as 16S rRNA for prokaryotes and ITS or 26S rRNA for fungi are compared to the standard databases. Studying of microbial community structure by NGS technology led us to understand realistic view of microbial world in the soils, biofilms, guts, and many other natural environments. The second challenging and promising field of researches with NGS technology is metagenomics and metatranscriptomics to understand functional profiles and expression of them in the natural environments. In this presentation, new findings and future direction with NGS technology will be discussed.