Advances in constraint-based modelling of microbial communities

Abstract

Microbial communities are near universally present in nature. A wealth of meta-omics data has been gathered from numerous ecosystems, such as the human gut, ocean or soil. Constraint-based reconstruction and analysis is a valuable tool for the contextualisation of meta-omics data and allows for the mechanistic prediction of metabolic fluxes. Advances in genome-scale reconstruction and multispecies modelling tools have enabled the construction and interrogation of constraint-based multispecies models on the microbiome scale spanning hundreds of organisms. Here, we give a comprehensive overview of the areas of application for these multiscale, strain- and molecule-resolved multispecies models, and discuss key works, in which computational modelling yielded novel biological knowledge. We show that constraint-based microbiome modelling can complement experimental approaches and has valuable applications spanning from ecology, human health, industry to environmental conservation.