Microbial ecology and metagenomics

This chapter explores microbial ecology and metagenomics. It notes the role of microbial communities in nature in line with outstanding issues in microbial ecology such as species identification, population dynamics, and community structure. Moreover, the chapter explains immunological and genomic approaches to microbial ecology. An example of which would be antibody identification. The chapter also discusses metagenomics in relation to ribosomal sequences and microbial ecology. The chapter looks at the genetic variability of bacteria species. It also discusses the phylogeography of viruses, bacteria, and fungi. DNA hybridization methods based on DNA microarray technology offer great promise on microbial identification and community analysis, especially where it is necessary to resolve closely related operational taxonomic units (OTU).