**5. Microbiome analysis techniques**

Microbiome research is a highly transdisciplinary field with a wide range of applications and methods for studying it. There are a number of different technologies available to study the microbiome. Traditional microbiology has historically focused on the study of individual species as isolated units. In the mid-2000s, advances in DNA sequencing technology spawned a new branch of study known as

**Figure 1.** *Microbiome-researching technologies [32].* *Microbiome - The Power House of Health and Disease DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.106026*

metagenomics, which allows for a comprehensive exploration of microbial communities without the requirement for culture. Instead of looking at the genome of a single bacterial strain cultivated in a lab, the metagenomics approach looks at a collection of genomes derived from microbial communities collected in natural settings, providing new insight into the complexity of human microbial populations [31] (**Figure 1**).

The identification of about 70% of human microbiota, which was not possible by the existing conventional microbiological methods, has been made possible by the development of the advanced techniques of metagenomics, metatranscriptomics, and metabolomics [33]. Metagenomic is a biotechnological perspective of studying the genome structure of the DNA directly extracted from their natural source [34]. Scientists have utilized these revolutionary approaches to prove the existence of genes from over a thousand different microbial species in our bodies. The metagenomic technique has the potential to uncover novel genes, gene families, and their encoded proteins that could have major implications in biotechnological and medicinal research. It enables us to investigate the makeup of a microbial population [35] (**Figure 2**).

Currently, multiple multinational organizations such as the HMP project and various other independently functioning programs are constantly generating huge amounts of data relating to metagenomic studies, and their microbiome data collection is managed by the Genomes Online Database (**Table 2**).

#### **Figure 2.**

*Major steps in the most widely acknowledged genomics strategy for human related microbiome studies are depicted graphically [2].*


*Microbiome - The Power House of Health and Disease DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.106026*


#### **Table 2.**

*Methods for analyzing the microbiome [36].*
