ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses some of the current weaknesses in microbiome science that were established in the recent years which resulted in a low concordance between microbiome studies and currently limit the capacity to identify causal relationships between host-associated microorganisms and a disease. The chapter argues that one of the major obstacles is, besides an inconsistent terminology, that most studies have focused on identifying the species composition of the human microbiota and, to a lesser extent, the “functional potential”, which however holds the key to understand the microbiome's role in human disease development
