Unraveling the food web in your gut

Despite recent progress, the organization and ecological properties of intestinal microbial ecosystem remain under investigated. Using a manually curated metabolic module framework for (meta-)genomic data analysis, researchers studied species-function relationships in gut microbial genomes and microbiomes. The Flemish Gut Flora Project observed that half of the bacteria in the human gut were metabolic generalists, while others were specializing and feeding on specific substrates.