Techniques for Tracking Microbial Community Structure and Function in Natural Environment and Engineered Systems

Microbial community activity impact on changes in environment and bioprocesses efficiency, however their structure and function are also strongly affected by the condition of their surrounding environment. Understanding mechanisms underlying microbes-environments interactions would allow the predictions of environmental changes and optimization of existingmicrobe-engineered systems. Therefore linking microbial community structure tofunction and environmental changes has been one of the biggest challengesfor scientific committee in this last decade. Addressing such challenge requires microbial population analysis under various conditions over time and space. Thus, it is important tomaster and comprehend appropriate methods for analyzing microbial community diversity, structure and function in various environments. In this paper number of techniques is presented, and their advantages and disadvantages are evaluated.