Utilizing microbiome approaches to assist source tracking, treatment and prevention of COVID-19: Review and assessment

COVID-19 has been one of the most serious infectious diseases since the end of 2019. However, the original source, as well as the treatment and prevention of causative agent of COVID-19 (namely SARS-CoV-2) are still unclear nearly a year after its publicly report. The microbiome approach, which has emerged in recent years focusing on human-related microbes, has become one of the promising avenues for source tracking, treatment, and prevention of a variety of infectious diseases including COVID-19. In this review, we summarized the microbiome approach as a supplementary approach for source tracking, treatment, and prevention of SARS-CoV-2 infection. We first provided background information on SARS-CoV-2 and microbiome approaches. Then we illustrated current strategies of microbiome methods to assist three aspects of COVID-19 research, namely source tracking, treatment, and prevention, respectively. Finally, we summarized the microbiome approaches and provided perspectives for future studies on faster and more effective SARS-CoV-2 epidemiology and pathogenesis based on microbiome approaches.