Publication Type
Journal
Journal Name
Nature Reviews Microbiology
Publication Date
Page Numbers
196 to 205
Volume
7
Issue
3
Abstract
It is widely accepted that microbial communities, not individual microorganisms, are the relevant ecological units, yet what we know about metabolic functioning of microbial communities could be written on a postage stamp. The recent developments in comprehensive molecular methods promise to gain a better understanding of how organisms within communities interact and how communities and their populations evolve. Here we highlight recent advances and insights gathered by the application of proteogenomics to microbial communities. We explore the history of how unrelated fields of microbial ecology, genomics, biological mass spectrometry and informatics converge to the development of a new field of metaproteomics.
