Pharm-Olam Blog What is the Difference Between Microbiome and Microbiota?

Medicine is continually advancing. New bodily mechanisms are uncovered and understood as analytical platforms improve. It happens almost by a zeitgeist, with several locations around the world happening upon similar discoveries and subsequent researchers leveraging those findings to prompt an evolution of those understandings. The transformation manifests by a sudden influx of publications describing the phenomenon, but this change is evident in the volume of work surrounding the discovery. It also becomes apparent in the vocabulary used to describe elements of the mechanism. Lately, microbial communities have received increased attention and a relative explosion in study volume, but there are still misunderstandings about what each term means exactly. This article will review the vocabulary related to the body’s microbial communities and explain how the terms differ from one another.