The Effect of Diet on Gut Microbiota in Humans Living in Different Environments: A Metagenomic Approach

Abstract

In the twentieth century, our knowledge of the gut microbiota was constrained by the ability to describe and study the biological functions of less than a 100 cultivable bacteria (Finegold et al. 1983). The species we described until 2000 were also the most abundant ones, and given the special attention of funding agencies toward pathogens, we fundamentally ignored the genome to functions relation for the vast majority of our commensal, except in the case of a handful of bacterial species used in food production.