Applications

Soil ecosystem researches

GeoChip has been used to investigate soil microbial communities to address fundamental ecological questions, such as global climate change (He et al., 2010a), bioremediation/phytoremediation (Leigh et al., 2007; Yergeau et al., 2007; Xiong et al., 2010), land use (Zhang et al., 2007), and ecology theories (Zhou et al., 2008; He et al., 2010b).

Human & animial microbiomes

Currently, the latest version of GeoChip 4.0, HuMiChip are used to characterize human and animal microbiomes, which hold great potentials for us to understand interactions between hosts and their associated microbial communities, especially human and animal health and disease.

Bioreactor systems

GeoChip has been also used for analysis of microbial communities from controlled environments like bioreactor systems (Rodriguez-Martinez et al., 2006; Liu et al., 2010).

Extreme enviroments

GeoChip has been used to investigate the functional diversity, composition, structure and metabolic potential of microbial communities from extreme environments, including deep sea hydrothermal vents (Wang et al., 2009), deep sea basalts (Mason et al., 2009), hypersaline lake (Parnell et al., 2010) and acid mine drainage (Xie et al., 2010).

Groundwater & aquatic ecosystems