Modeling metabolism of the human gut microbiome

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.