PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Andrew W. Brooks
AU  - Sambhawa Priya
AU  - Ran Blekhman
AU  - Seth R. Bordenstein
TI  - Gut Microbiota Diversity across Ethnicities in the United States
AID  - 10.1101/342915
DP  - 2018 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 342915
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/06/08/342915.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/06/08/342915.full
AB  - Composed of hundreds of microbial species, the composition of the human gut microbiota can vary with chronic diseases underlying health disparities that disproportionally affect ethnic minorities. However, the influence of ethnicity on the gut microbiota remains largely unexplored and lacks reproducible generalizations across studies. By distilling associations between ethnicity and gut microbiota variation in two American datasets including 1,673 individuals, we report 12 microbial genera and families that reproducibly vary by ethnicity. Interestingly, a majority of these microbial taxa, including the most heritable bacterial family, Christensenellaceae, overlap with genetically-associated lineages and form co-occurring clusters of taxa linked by similar fermentative and methanogenic metabolic processes. These results demonstrate recurrent associations between specific taxa in the gut microbiota and ethnicity, providing hypotheses for examining specific members of the gut microbiota as mediators of health disparities.AbbreviationsAGPAmerican Gut ProjectANOSIMAnalysis of SimilarityAUCArea Under the CurveBMIBody Mass IndexFSTFixation IndexGWASGenome-Wide Association StudiesHMPHuman Microbiome ProjectMAFMinor Allele FrequencyOTUOperational Taxonomic UnitPERMANOVAPermutational Multivariate Analysis of VarianceRFRandom ForestROCReceiver Operating CharacteristicSMOTESynthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique