Computer reconstruction of the ecological structure of intestinal microbiota communities based on high-throughput sequencing data

Human gut microbiota is essential for human health. Under the recent avalanche of metagenomic high-throughput sequencing data methods for its bioinformatic analysis and ecological reconstruction gain particular relevance. In this study, we employ the trait-based ecology approach to create a method of computer reconstruction of the ecological structure of intestinal microbiota communities based on high-throughput sequencing data and apply it to the synthetic community comprised of the key representatives of the human gut microbiota. Using this structure allowed us to evaluate the abundance of respective functional groups and infer a knowledge about the processes associated with them. The developed method can be applied to analyze intestinal microbial communities of other related species.