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Microbiome

A microbiota is an 'ecological community of commensal, symbiotic and pathogenic microorganisms' found in and on all multicellular organisms studied to date from plants to animals. A microbiota includes bacteria, archaea, protists, fungi and viruses. Microbiota have been found to be crucial for immunologic, hormonal and metabolic homeostasis of their host.The synonymous term microbiome describes either the collective genomes of the microorganisms that reside in an environmental niche or the microorganisms themselves. A microbiota is an 'ecological community of commensal, symbiotic and pathogenic microorganisms' found in and on all multicellular organisms studied to date from plants to animals. A microbiota includes bacteria, archaea, protists, fungi and viruses. Microbiota have been found to be crucial for immunologic, hormonal and metabolic homeostasis of their host.The synonymous term microbiome describes either the collective genomes of the microorganisms that reside in an environmental niche or the microorganisms themselves. The microbiome and host emerged during evolution as a synergistic unit from epigenetics and genetic characteristics, sometimes collectively referred to as a holobiont. All plants and animals, from simple life forms to humans, live in close association with microbial organisms. Several advances have driven the perception of microbiomes, including: Biologists have come to appreciate that microbes make up an important part of an organism's phenotype, far beyond the occasional symbiotic case study. Commensalism, a concept developed by Pierre-Joseph van Beneden (1809-1894), a Belgian professor at the University of Louvain during the nineteenth century is central to the microbiome, where microbiota colonize a host in a non-harmful coexistence. The relationship with their host is called mutualistic when organisms perform tasks that are known to be useful for the host,:700 parasitic, when disadvantageous to the host. Other authors define a situation as mutualistic where both benefit, and commensal, where the unaffected host benefits the symbiont. A nutrient exchange may be bidirectional or unidirectional, may be context dependent and may occur in diverse ways. Microbiota that are expected to be present, and that under normal circumstances do not cause disease, are deemed normal flora or normal microbiota. The initial acquisition of microbiota in animals from mammalians to marine sponges is at birth, and may even occur through the germ cell line. In plants, the colonizing process can be initiated below ground in the root zone, around the germinating seed, the spermosphere, or originate from the above ground parts, the phyllosphere and the flower zone or anthosphere. The stability of the rhizosphere microbiota over generations depends upon the plant type but even more on the soil composition, i.e. living and non living environment. Consensus exists among evolutionary biologists that one should not separate an organism's genes from the context of its resident microbes. The human microbiota includes bacteria, fungi, archaea and viruses. Micro-animals which live on the human body are excluded. The human microbiome refers to their genomes. Humans are colonized by many microorganisms; the traditional estimate was that humans live with ten times more non-human cells than human cells; more recent estimates have lowered this to 3:1 and even to about 1:1.

[ "Genetics", "Bioinformatics", "Composition (visual arts)", "Immunology", "Bacteria", "International Scientific Association for Probiotics and Prebiotics", "mothur", "Bacterial 16S rRNA sequencing", "Root microbiome", "Polysaccharide breakdown" ]
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