Genome-inferred correspondence between phylogeny and metabolic traits in the wild Drosophila gut microbiome

The metabolic capability of microorganisms can be inferred from genome sequence data but metagenomics and related -omics methods, widely used to study complex microbial communities, including microbiomes in animal guts, have limited capacity to assign specific metabolic functions to specific taxa. Our analysis of the genome sequence of bacterial isolates from the gut microbiome of Drosophila fruit flies was to identify how well bacterial taxonomy predicted metabolic functions. The assignment, in this study, of function to taxon for members of a complex gut microbiome provides the basis for future studies on ecology and evolution of bacterial metabolism in gut microbiomes.