The human gut microbiome is a complex ecosystem with hundreds of species.
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Metabolic modeling can help identifying metabolic cross-talk among gut microbes.
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Diverse dietary components and microbiome compositions can be studied.
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Personalized gut microbiome models can be created by integrating diverse data types.
The human gut microbiome plays an important part in human health. The complexity of the microbiome makes it difficult to determine the detailed metabolic functions and cross-talk occurs between the individual species. In silico systems biology studies of the microbiome can help to identify metabolite exchanges among gut microbes. Constraint-based reconstruction and analysis methods use biochemically accurate genome-scale metabolic networks of microorganisms to simulate metabolism between species in a given microbiome and help generate novel hypotheses on microbial interactions. Here, we review metabolic modeling studies that have investigated metabolic functions of the gut microbiome.
