Human Microbiome

The importance and function of the human gut microbiome has gained unprecedented traction in recent years and the contribution of Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) technologies to this research area cannot be disputed. Shotgun and amplicon-based metagenomic sequencing can detect microbiome function and individual species within it, respectively. The composition of the microbiome contributes to overall health and protection from pathogenic strains and NGS has provided data to allow links to be drawn between various diseases and microbiome diversity and function. A lot of work remains to be done in confirming causality in this context, and NGS can be of assistance here.