Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Soil microbial communities are central players in the global carbon cycle, yet our understanding of how their metabolism affects soil carbon dynamics is limited. Exometabolomics is a very promising approach for characterizing the functioning of soil microbial communities in their environment, and for linking organic carbon in soil to the metabolism of particular microorganisms or taxonomic groups. Despite some technical challenges for community exometabolomics analysis related to the complexity of soil structure, a number of reports demonstrate the utility of this approach. The full potential of soil microbial community exometabolomics will be realized when it can be integrated with other approaches such as metagenomics, metatranscriptomics, and metaproteomics. Such data integration should enable better predictions of the effects of environmental perturbations on soil carbon cycling by soil microorganisms.