In this interview Paul Wilmes, University of Luxembourg, explores the concept of infective competence within a One Health framework, describing it as the collective capacity of microbiomes to harbor and transmit virulence factors, antimicrobial resistance genes, biosynthetic gene clusters, toxins, and other disease-relevant determinants. 

By integrating metagenomic, metatranscriptomic, metaproteomic, and metabolomic data from the same samples, the work aims to reconstruct interaction networks within microbial communities and identify how their emerging properties may causally influence human disease pathways. 

Central to this approach is the PathoFact pipeline, used to systematically profile infective competence across diverse microbiome reservoirs, including humans, animals, the built environment, and natural ecosystems. The interview highlighted findings from hospital settings, community transmission of SARS-CoV-2, animal antimicrobial exposure, wastewater treatment systems, and glacier-fed streams, showing how different environments shape gene flow and resistance dynamics. Additional results linked oral-to-gut microbial transmission with inflammatory signatures in type 1 diabetes. To move from association to mechanism, the research program is expanding its HUMIX microfluidic model and coupling high-throughput experiments with advanced AI methods to identify causal molecules and host interactions. Overall, the talk positioned infective competence as a unifying concept for studying how interconnected microbiome reservoirs contribute to health and disease in the broader context of planetary change.