Toward hypothesis-driven, personalized microbiome screening.

The human gut microbiome is crucial for human health and disease but exhibits extensive individual-level strain variation. Distinct strains encode and express different functions. The resulting emergent properties therefore differentially affect human health and disease in a personalized manner. Pryszlak et al. have made strides in tackling the challenge of genome-based microbiome screening which will ultimately yield strain-level understanding of the functional roles played by the human gut microbiome.