Using proteins to study how microbes contribute to soil ecosystem services: The current state and future perspectives of soil metaproteomics

Metaproteomics was established to analyse both the structure and the function of microbial communities and, particularly in soils, their contribution to ecosystem services. In this review, we provide an overview on how the study of the soil metaproteome can provide fundamental information on the role of microbial communities in soil ecosystem services. We further discuss the strengths and weaknesses of soil metaproteomics in comparison to other culture-independent OMIC techniques. We critically review its bottlenecks but also provide strategies to mitigate and possible directions for future research as the direct link of structure and function is advantageous and complementary to metagenomics, metatranscriptomics and metametabolomics.