BiomeGPT: A foundation model for the human gut microbiome
The human gut microbiome encodes rich information about host health, yet current analysis pipelines remain narrowly optimized for individual tasks. This limits our ability to gain a thorough view of how the microbiome impacts health and disease. Here we introduce BiomeGPT, a transformer-based foundation model pretrained on over 13,300 human gut metagenomes spanning 32 phenotypes--including healthy and 31 diverse diseases--to learn context-aware, species-level gut microbiome representations. The model captures quantitative compositional structure and intricate cross-species dependencies embedded within community profiles. When fine-tuned for predicting host health status, BiomeGPT accurately distinguishes healthy from diseased microbiomes and resolves individual disease states across a broad clinical spectrum. Furthermore, its attention patterns reveal biologically plausible microbial signatures, highlighting both shared and disease-specific microbial species linked to host phenotypes. By providing a unified, scalable framework for species-level gut microbiome representation learning and prediction, BiomeGPT enables new avenues for biomarker discovery, disease stratification, and microbiome-driven precision medicine.