Gut Microbial BioBanks: Construction and Applications

Abstract:

The gut microbiome (GM) is extremely complicated in composition and function. Many culture-independent studies have demonstrated that the GM plays a pivotal role in host health and its imbalance has close relevance with various diseases. Meanwhile, increasing more researchers have realized that the culturable gut microbial biobanks are the resource foundations to facilitate the in-depth studies of GM by transition from meta-data based on relevance analysis to experimental validation of host-microbe interactions and GM-disease causality and further application in human health management. In this review, we summarize the recent progresses on large-scale gut microbial isolation and cultivation from different hosts, and provide a few examples for application of cultured microbial resources in high throughput sequencing data analyzing and in host-microbe interaction studies.