A Reproducible and Tunable Synthetic Soil Microbial Community Provides New Insights into Microbial Ecology.

Microbial soil communities form commensal relationships with plants to promote the growth of both parties. The optimization of plant-microbe interactions to advance sustainable agriculture is an important field in agricultural research. However, investigation in this field is hindered by a lack of model microbial community systems and efficient approaches for building these communities.

synDNA-a Synthetic DNA Spike-in Method for Absolute Quantification of Shotgun Metagenomic Sequencing.

Microbiome studies have the common goal of determining which microbial taxa are present, respond to specific conditions, or promote phenotypic changes in the host. Most of these studies rely on relative abundance measurements to drive conclusions. Inherent limitations of relative values are the inability to determine whether an individual taxon is more or less abundant and the magnitude of this change between the two samples.