RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 A Novel Index for Predicting Health Status Using Species-level Gut Microbiome Profiling
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 2020.02.24.962100
DO 10.1101/2020.02.24.962100
A1 Vinod K. Gupta
A1 Minsuk Kim
A1 Utpal Bakshi
A1 Kevin Y. Cunningham
A1 John M. Davis III
A1 Konstantinos N. Lazaridis
A1 Heidi Nelson
A1 Nicholas Chia
A1 Jaeyun Sung
YR 2020
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/02/25/2020.02.24.962100.abstract
AB The development of a biologically-interpretable and robust metric that provides clear insight into the general health status (i.e. healthy or non-healthy) of one’s gut microbiome remains an important target in human microbiome research. We introduce the Gut Microbiome Health Index (GMHI), a mathematical formula that determines the degree to which a gut microbiome profile reflects good or adverse health. GMHI was formulated based on microbial species specific to healthy gut ecosystems. These species were identified through a multi-study, integrative analysis on 4,347 human stool metagenomes from 34 published studies across healthy and 12 different disease or abnormal bodyweight conditions. When demonstrated on our population-scale meta-dataset, GMHI is the most robust and consistent predictor of general health compared to α-diversity indices commonly considered as markers for gut health. Validation of GMHI on 679 samples from 9 additional studies resulted in remarkable reproducibility in distinguishing healthy and non-healthy groups. Our findings suggest that gut taxonomic signatures can indeed serve as robust predictors of general health, and highlight the importance of how data sharing efforts can provide broadly-applicable novel discoveries.