Figure 2.

New technologies reveal new pictures of human-associated microbial communities. With the development of new technologies—including but not limited to high-throughput sequencing—the increase in the amount of data we can gather has allowed us to better test and understand the ecological processes acting within our microbial selves and, in turn, will help to frame future work within an ecological context. The colour of each star indicates the methodologies used in the different studies: dark blue, microscopic observation; blue, culturing; green, Sanger sequencing; red, pyrosequencing; yellow, metagenome sequencing (Eckburg et al, 2005; Moore & Moore, 1994; Savage, 1977). Estimates are based on a rough count of individuals reported in studies and articles describing human-associated microbes or communities, and are probably underestimates of the numbers of subjects.