Microbiome Ecosystem Ecology: Unseen Majority in an Anthropogenic Ecosystem

Abstract

Microbiome or microbial diversity is the dominant component of the Earth’s biodiversity. Though present everywhere, the abundance of microbiome varies across different habitats depending on prevailing environmental and biogeographic conditions. Microbiome possesses a central role in general ecosystem ecology in addition to having tremendous applications in agricultural, industrial, and biomedical research. In the recent years, there has been a resurgence of interest to investigate global microbiome diversity (e.g., human, animal, plant, soil, air, ocean, and atmosphere, etc.) within the context of classical community ecology research in an effort to understand the functional role of this tiny majority in performing different services for human well-being. However, since a vast majority of the Earth’s microbiome is uncultured, microbial studies are largely survey-based descriptive reports resulting from DNA fingerprinting, thus making it difficult to link individual microbiome species to attribute to certain ecosystem service or function. This becomes more challenging in an era in which microbiome diversity across spatio-temporal scales is subjected to tremendous alterations in the ecosystem caused by land use and climate changes. Improving culture-dependent and-independent methods with broader applications of eco-statistical approaches may advance the understanding of global microbiome diversity, and thus could help us utilize microbiome resources more efficiently and effectively in this changing world.