We introduce a new dominance concept consisting of three new dominance metrics based on Lloyd’s (1967) mean crowding index. The new metrics link communities and species, whereas existing ones are applicable only to communities. Our community-level metric is a function of Simpson’s diversity index. For species, our metric quantifies the difference between community dominance and the dominance of...

As sea surface temperatures rise and the global human population increases, large-scale field observations of marine organism health and water quality are increasingly necessary. We investigated the health of corals from the family Fungiidae using visual observations in relation to water quality and microbial biogeochemistry parameters along 1300 km of the Red Sea coast of Saudi Arabia. At larg...

Dental caries has a polymicrobial etiology within the complex oral microbial ecosystem. However, the overall diversity and structure of supragingival plaque microbiota in adult dental health and caries are not well understood. Here, 160 supragingival plaque samples from patients with dental health and different severities of dental caries were collected for bacterial genomic DNA extraction, pyr...

Gastrointestinal mucositis is a debilitating side effect of chemotherapy treatment, with currently no treatment available. As changes in microbial composition have been reported upon chemotherapy treatment in vivo, it is thought that gut microbiota dysbiosis contribute to the mucositis etiology. Yet it is not known whether chemotherapeutics directly cause microbial dysbiosis, thereby increasing...

Prolonged diffuse laryngeal inflammation from smoking and/or reflux is commonly diagnosed as chronic laryngitis and treated empirically with expensive drugs that have not proven effective. Shifts in microbiota have been associated with many inflammatory diseases, though little is known about how resident microbes may contribute to chronic laryngitis. We sought to characterize the core microbiot...

Dietary preferences and nutrients composition have been shown to influence human and gut microbial metabolism, which ultimately has specific effects on health and diseases' risk. Increasingly, results from molecular biology and microbiology demonstrate the key role of the gut microbiota metabolic interface to the overall mammalian host's health status. There is therefore raising interest in nut...

A current trend in the understanding of the pathogenesis of several human endogenous infections is to shift away from a reductionist paradigm to a holistic view of the microbial community as the unit of pathogenicity. Data brought about by studies on the pathogenicity of mixed infections, amalgamated with emerging information on physiological cooperative behavior of multispecies biofilms, bacte...