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The advent of high-throughput genomic sequencing has extended our understanding of not only the human genome, but also the genomes of normal commensal human microbial flora. A multinational team of investigators has now undertaken a comprehensive analysis of human fecal flora, based on broad genomic sequencing of samples from individuals in Europe (22), Japan (13), and the U.S. (2).
Firmicutes and Bacteroidetes phyla predominated across samples from all individuals. Multidimensional analysis of the fecal flora in relation to the presence of microbial species and differing microbial gene functionality revealed that each individual's samples could be clustered into one of just three groups (enterotypes), based on which of the following genera …