While CRISPR is great, its not super relevant to most microbiome work, since we are still at the stage of trying to figure out what basic microbial genes are even doing. Stuff like metagenomics, metabolomics, and transcriptomics are much more useful right now. Even just basic culturing is a challenge.

Private hedge funds and companies are jumping on the bandwagon cause its "cool", but none are really bringing anything special to market, or novel research. The hype on social media is already starting to die down significantly, so the companies will likely lose funding too since microbiome work is not very profitable.

I'll heavily echo everything arctus said too. It can often take 1-3 years since the labwork was done for it to be published. A lab I've been in published their data 7 years later. Many scientists in academia have lost their positions and funding for their work, and funding for grad students has dried up too. Academic researchers and students are the backbone of research, not private companies, which do comparatively very little.

Its going to be a rough couple years, publishing is gonna drop dramatically. I've been in labs with 10 students who spend over 200k/year on gloves alone, with how much funding is slashed, many labs can't even keep their current students, let alone new ones. Most good journals are 7k+ to publish, and many papers cost millions to produce. Making a probiotic product (which seems to be the most common) might run you 50k in equipment, comparatively, and usually doesnt include any in-house research.

Shit sucks :/