Different Dimensions in Microbial Community Adaptation and Function

Abstract

With the omics tool, the challenges in understanding the microbial community functions are becoming more intriguing. It is the environment created scenario, which demands alignment of the different members of the community for the desired output leading to common condition for their survival. The resultant community pathways provide a broad umbrella of metabolic options giving the desired plasticity, which plays decision making role in the adaptation process. The initial step in community characterization must involve the discovery of key and core member of the community and monitoring the fluctuations in functional abundance over the space and time. The concept of entropy and metabolic fluxes must reflect the inner metabolic machinery of the taxon selection and route of functional operation in a community. The segregation of member based on their functional role and hierarchical level in the community must be an essential step to be followed by interaction mapping and measurement of metabolic fluxes to derive the flow of metabolites within the community. This conceptual framework and integrated omics tools with supported statistical modeling algorithm can help in bringing out finer details in the process of community functional adaptation in any given scenario.