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bioRxiv · 10.1101/2020.02.24.962100

A Novel Index for Predicting Health Status Using Species-level Gut Microbiome Profiling

Gupta, V. K.·Kim, M.·Bakshi, U.·Cunningham, K. Y.·Davis, J. M.·Lazaridis, K. N.·Nelson, H.·Chia, N.·Sung, J.
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Abstract

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 ones 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 -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.

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Gupta, V. K., Kim, M., Bakshi, U., Cunningham, K. Y., Davis, J. M., Lazaridis, K. N., Nelson, H., Chia, N., Sung, J.. 2020-02-25. A Novel Index for Predicting Health Status Using Species-level Gut Microbiome Profiling. https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.02.24.962100

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