Studying microbial communities: a review of EcoPlate use cases and the newest community analysis features in Odin Software.

With three decades of use and over 1,400 published papers, Biolog’s EcoPlates have become a well-established and powerful method for evaluating the functional diversity of microbial communities. EcoPlates can be used to characterize functional traits of microbial populations from soil or water, for example, under either aerobic or anaerobic conditions. This facilitates the quantification of the metabolic capabilities of microbial communities across any natural or perturbed environment. This webinar will describe recent publications where EcoPlates have been employed in top-down and bottom-up approaches to answer questions in basic and applied microbial ecology. We will also review the new Community Analysis features in Odin software, inspired by EcoPlate users. Incorporating the richness of kinetic data obtained with the Odin family of instruments, this platform provides an ideal method for understanding the metabolic profiles of microbiome samples, and how diverse populations can change over time and with various treatments.