• While microorganisms are invisible to the human eye, they are not silent inhabitants but provide indispensable functions to the environment or host they live in or on.
• The microbiome comprises all of the genetic material within a microbiota, i.e. the entire collection of microorganisms in a specific niche, such as the human gut.
• Analysis of this genetic material aids the characterization of the microbial community, which can be defined as an assemblage of co-occurring, and potentially interacting, microbes, present in a defined habitat in space and time.
• The composition and diversity of the human gut microbiome have been linked to a wide range of phenotypes in health and disease. ViennaLab Diagnostics provides assays to analyze the microbial composition in detail.