Bottom-up ecology of the human microbiome: from metagenomes to metabolomes

The environmental metabolome is a dominant and essential factor shaping microbial communities. Thus, we hypothesized that metagenomic datasets could reveal the quantitative metabolic status of a given sample. Using a newly developed bottom-up ecology algorithm, we predicted high-resolution metabolomes of hundreds of metagenomic datasets from the human microbiome, revealing body-site specific metabolomes consistent with known metabolomics data, and suggesting that common cosmetics ingredients are some of the major metabolites shaping the human skin microbiome.