Carper, D. L. et al., 2020. PeerJ

DISCo-microbe:  Design of an identifiable synthetic community of microbes

Dana L. Carper, Travis J. Lawerence, Alyssa A. Carrell, Dale A. Pelletier, and David J. Weston

 08 January 2020, PeerJ 8:e8534; doi: 10.7717/peerj.8534

Abstract

Microbiomes are extremely important for their host organisms, providing many vital functions and extending their hosts’ phenotypes. Natural studies of host-associated microbiomes can be difficult to interpret due to the high complexity of microbial communities, which hinders our ability to track and identify individual members along with the many factors that structure or perturb those communities. For this reason, researchers have turned to synthetic or constructed communities in which the identities of all members are known. However, due to the lack of tracking methods and the difficulty of creating a more diverse and identifiable community that can be distinguished through next-generation sequencing, most such in vivo studies have used only a few strains.

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