van Kasteren Sander, Rozen Daniel E
Leiden Institute of Chemistry and The Institute of Chemical Immunology, Leiden University, Einsteinweg 55, Leiden, 2300 RA, The Netherlands.
Institute of Biology, Leiden University, Sylviusweg 72, Leiden, 2300 RA, The Netherlands.
ISME Commun. 2023 Jan 31;3(1):9. doi: 10.1038/s43705-022-00205-5.
Technological advances have largely driven the revolution in our understanding of the structure and function of microbial communities. Culturing, long the primary tool to probe microbial life, was supplanted by sequencing and other -omics approaches, which allowed detailed quantitative insights into species composition, metabolic potential, transcriptional activity, secretory responses and more. Although the ability to characterize "who's there" has never been easier or cheaper, it remains technically challenging and expensive to understand what the diverse species and strains that comprise microbial communities are doing in situ, and how these behaviors change through time. Our aim in this brief review is to introduce a developing toolkit based on click chemistry that can accelerate and reduce the expense of functional analyses of the ecology and evolution of microbial communities. After first outlining the history of technological development in this field, we will discuss key applications to date using diverse labels, including BONCAT, and then end with a selective (biased) view of areas where click-chemistry and BONCAT-based approaches stand to have a significant impact on our understanding of microbial communities.
技术进步在很大程度上推动了我们对微生物群落结构和功能认识的革命。长期以来作为探究微生物生命主要工具的培养方法，已被测序和其他“组学”方法所取代，这些方法能够对物种组成、代谢潜力、转录活性、分泌反应等进行详细的定量分析。尽管表征“有哪些微生物”的能力从未如此便捷和廉价，但要了解构成微生物群落的各种物种和菌株在原位的行为以及这些行为如何随时间变化，在技术上仍然具有挑战性且成本高昂。在这篇简短综述中，我们的目的是介绍一种基于点击化学的不断发展的工具包，它可以加速并降低微生物群落生态与进化功能分析的成本。在首先概述该领域技术发展的历史之后，我们将讨论迄今为止使用包括BONCAT在内的各种标记的关键应用，最后以一种有选择性的（有偏向性的）视角，审视点击化学和基于BONCAT的方法在哪些领域有望对我们理解微生物群落产生重大影响。
