Microbial population genomics and ecology.

Microbial population genomics and ecology: the road ahead.

Grappling with Proteus: population level approaches to understanding microbial diversity

The emerging fields of microbial population genetics and genomics provide an avenue to study the ecological rules that govern how communities form, function, and evolve. Our struggle to understand the causes and consequences of microbial diversity stems from our inability to define ecologically and evolutionarily meaningful units of diversity. The 16S rRNA-based tools that have been so useful i...

Integration of genomics and proteomics into marine microbial ecology

Genomics and proteomics of microorganisms are revolutionizing our understanding of marine microbial ecology. In this essay we address this by discussing (1) what microbial genome resources are available for marine ecologists, (2) how single-organism genomics and proteomics have revealed new microbial functions in the marine ecosystem, and (3) how the integration of metagenomics, metaproteomics ...

Microbial ecology in the age of genomics and metagenomics: concepts, tools, and recent advances.

Microbial ecology examines the diversity and activity of micro-organisms in Earth's biosphere. In the last 20 years, the application of genomics tools have revolutionized microbial ecological studies and drastically expanded our view on the previously underappreciated microbial world. This review first introduces the basic concepts in microbial ecology and the main genomics methods that have be...

Molecular Techniques to Assess Microbial Community Structure, Function, and Dynamics in the Environment

I. Ahmad et al. (eds.), Microbes and Microbial Technology: Agricultural and Environmental Applications, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-7931-5_2, © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011 Abstract Culture-based methods are important in investigating the microbial ecology of natural and anthropogenically impacted environments, but they are extremely biased in their evaluation of microbial genetic diver...