The use of systems biology to study complex biological questions is gaining ground due to the ever-increasing amount of genetic tools and genome sequences available. As such, systems biology concepts and approaches are increasingly underpinning our concept of microbial physiology. Three tools for use in functional genomics are gene expression, proteomics, and metabolomics. However, these tools produce such large data sets that we sometimes become paralyzed trying to merge the data and link it to form a consistent biological interpretation. Use of functional groupings has relieved some of the issues in merging data for biological meaning. Statistical analysis and visualization of these multi-dimension data sets are needed to aid the microbiologist, which brings additional methods that are often not familiar. Progress is being made to bring these diverse data types together to understand fundamental metabolic processes and pathways. These efforts are paying tremendous dividends in our understanding of how microbes live, grow, survive, and metabolize nutrients. These insights allow metabolic engineering to progress and allow scientists to further define the mechanisms of metabolism.
Microbial Systems Ecology to Understand Cross-Feeding in Microbiomes
