Couvillion Sneha P, Agrawal Neha, Colby Sean M, Brandvold Kristoffer R, Metz Thomas O
Biological Sciences Division, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA, United States.
Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine, Washington State University, Spokane, WA, United States.
Front Cell Infect Microbiol. 2020 Jul 31;10:388. doi: 10.3389/fcimb.2020.00388. eCollection 2020.
Even as the field of microbiome research has made huge strides in mapping microbial community composition in a variety of environments and organisms, explaining the phenotypic influences on the host by microbial taxa-both known and unknown-and their specific functions still remain major challenges. A pressing need is the ability to assign specific functions in terms of enzymes and small molecules to specific taxa or groups of taxa in the community. This knowledge will be crucial for advancing personalized therapies based on the targeted modulation of microbes or metabolites that have predictable outcomes to benefit the human host. This perspective article advocates for the combined use of standards-free metabolomics and activity-based protein profiling strategies to address this gap in functional knowledge in microbiome research via the identification of novel biomolecules and the attribution of their production to specific microbial taxa.
尽管微生物组研究领域在绘制各种环境和生物体中的微生物群落组成方面取得了巨大进展，但解释已知和未知微生物分类群对宿主的表型影响及其特定功能仍然是重大挑战。迫切需要的是能够将酶和小分子的特定功能分配给群落中的特定分类群或分类群组。这些知识对于推进基于对微生物或代谢物进行靶向调节的个性化疗法至关重要，这些调节具有可预测的结果，有利于人类宿主。这篇观点文章主张结合使用无标准代谢组学和基于活性的蛋白质谱分析策略，通过识别新型生物分子并将其产生归因于特定微生物分类群，来弥补微生物组研究中功能知识的这一空白。
