However, detailed mechanistic insights into microbe-microbe interactions often remain undetermined. Although online monitoring systems and diverse biosensors are available for microbial cultivation , quantitative and dynamic data are very limited for most microbial communities. Understanding the basic principles of metabolic exchanges is essential to control the intercellular interactions, spatiotemporal coordination, robustness and stability of synthetic microbial communities. A key challenge for designing stable interactions within synthetic consortia is to understand how functions can be partitioned across a microbial community in productive compartments to achieve desirable population-level behaviours . How to define such a partition, or a universal function? Here, we see the potential in organsim-free modular modelling approaches to guide complex community design, and to instruct building synthetic communities for exploiting novel behaviours and biotechnological applications. The key lies in focusing on metabolic interaction and functionality rather than on an organism itself. This, paired with collecting well thought "high level" quantitative data, will fully unlock the potential of synthetic biology.