Guest posting: Assoc. Prof. Josh Davis,  Principal Research Fellow/NHMRC Career Development Fellow, Menzies School of Health Research, Senior Staff Specialist Infectious Diseases Physician, John Hunter Hospital, Conjoint Professor School of Medicine and Public Health, University of Newcastle

The diverse bacterial communities which live in our gastrointestinal tract (primary in the colon), are collectively known as the “gut microbiota” and their collective genes are termed the “microbiome“.  A majority of the bacterial species cannot cultivated and require direct molecular techniques to ennumerate them.  Consideration of the microbiome is extremely topical in many fields of health-related research. At the recent major annual meeting of the American Society for Microbiology (ASM Microbe), the gut microbiome had its own stream (no pun intended – and the colour coding wasn’t brown) within the conference program, containing scores of research presentations in this field. In fact, one conference delegate, science writer and microbiologist Ed Yong, insisted…