Human Gut Microbiome Analysis and Multi-omics Approach

Given the importance of human gut microbioma in human health, its role has been recently reviewed and even now is the subject of many investigations. It is known that traditional culture methods are limited for analyzing it and that high-throughput sequencing, omics technologies instead allow to deepen the behaviour of microbial ecology. With the application of omics technologies, as metagenomics, metascriptomics, metaproteomics and metabolomics, many progress has been made in this field. Their integration, referred to as multi-omics approach, provides more evidence for biological mechanisms. This review highlights that omics approaches can be powerful tools in analyzing the human gut microbiome. The current scenario and examples of recently published landmark work are discussed and some limitations are outlined. Their combination is analyzed and relevant studies allowing us to link the expression of disease-associated microbial functions to distinct taxa are treated. Furthermore, recent system level approaches for integrating different omics layers are discussed and some researches aimed to develop a framework for the reconstruction of a large microbial community are examined. However, even today, we are aware that the multi-layer datasets integration is a challenging issue and that a careful planning of a multiomics application is thus required.