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长足的进步，并解释了微生物分类群对宿主的表型影响（已知的和未知的）及其特定功能仍然是主要挑战。迫切需要的是能够将特定的酶和小分子功能分配给社区中的特定分类群或分类群。这些知识对于基于对微生物或代谢物的靶向调节而进行个性化治疗至关重要，而这种靶向作用具有可预见的结果，可惠及人类宿主。