Fig. 1

Isolate exometabolomics is used to elucidate microbe-environment interactions that shape the individual interactions within larger ecosystems. Unique, stable microbial communities mediate nutrient cycling within ecosystems; using microbiology and genomics approaches, the biotic and abiotic constituents, metabolic potential and interspecies interactions can often be identified. However, these interactions may be unique to a particular environment and the metabolites that mediate these interactions are difficult to identify within a community (left). By using exometabolomics analyses to examine the interactions between individual species and environments (ex. soil extract or plant root exudate) within a laboratory setting (middle), we are able to build a metabolite-organism interaction web demonstrating how each biotic component contributes to the community (right) enabling predictions for metabolite exchange in microbiomes, design of synthetic media, and testing of hypotheses using in lab consortia and environmental amendments