Microbial Diversity

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Micro- and macro-organisms are habitually associated with interactions shaping contrasting environments between different host-microbial communities {{59 Hughes-Martiny, J.B. 2006;}}. These interactions are microbial dominated as microbes outnumber host cells by many orders of magnitude {{68 Savage, D.C. 1977;}} and provide metabolic functions lacking from the host {{69 Gill, S.R. 2006;}}. Naturally occurring populations can also include interactions between host-pathogens colonization {{16 Critzer, F.J. 2010;}} or health and disease states{{20 Frank, D.N. 2007; 21 Ley, R.E. 2005;}}. Interactions may elude to the importance of symbiotic or mutualistic relationship in community structure {{22 Ley, R.E. 2008; 40 Walter, J. 2010; 38 Oh, P.L. 2010; 39 Frese, S.A. 2011;}}.

Ecosystems, including engineered ones, are complex systems in which microorganisms occur in heterogeneous communities. Their behavior in the environment is often unknown due to the lack of proper detection and identification techniques. There has been a long-standing need for more accurately assessing microbial ecosystems {{70 Stahl, D.A. 1988;}}. Historically microbial ecology was reductive based on solely on the ability of microbes to be cultured, analyzed, and enumerated {{10 Mack, W.N. 1977;}}; microbes meeting this criterion were thought to comprise the dominating members of the environments they were isolated from, however most environments are dominated by uncultured microorganisms. In some environments it is estimated that as many as 99% of the endogenous species are uncultivable with existing methodologies {{74 Amann, R.I. 1995;}}. This means that any survey of microbial community members relying solely on culture-based techniques such as plate counts or ...

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...ant bacteria comprising spinach and fecal isolates. However, if rare species are more important in detecting differences between wholesome and contaminated foods then a much deeper characterization of the microbiome may be required.20

Community profiling through massively parallel sequencing is still time consuming and highly technical, therefore is limited to laboratory settings. To implement risk management techniques, candidates from sequencing relating to a high risk of fecal contamination will need to be analyzed through other methods. Quantitative real-time PCR is an attractive application for this as it allows for 96 different reactions to be completed simultaneously within a few hours. If high risk microbial candidates can be identified and established, future work would focus on implementing alternative methods that could be utilized in the food industry.

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