Magnúsdóttir, S. et al. Nat. Biotechnol. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nbt.3703 (2016).

Human health is inextricably linked to the metabolism of our resident gut bacteria. Magnúsdóttir et al. have embarked on an ambitious effort to generate genome-scale metabolic models of large numbers of bacteria for which some experimental data on function exist. The researchers generated metabolic models using constraint-based reconstruction and analysis (COBRA) and developed a comparative metabolic reconstruction method that makes it possible to propagate manual changes in individual models to other models. Using this framework, assembly of gut organisms through reconstruction and analysis (AGORA), the authors produced curated models for 773 human gut microbes representing 205 distinct genera. The resource will be useful to better understand microbial metabolism and to study host–microbe interactions that affect human health and disease.