The Landscape of Genetic Content in the Gut and Oral Human Microbiome. Review uri icon

Overview

abstract

  • Despite substantial interest in the species diversity of the human microbiome and its role in disease, the scale of its genetic diversity, which is fundamental to deciphering human-microbe interactions, has not been quantified. Here, we conducted a cross-study meta-analysis of metagenomes from two human body niches, the mouth and gut, covering 3,655 samples from 13 studies. We found staggering genetic heterogeneity in the dataset, identifying a total of 45,666,334 non-redundant genes (23,961,508 oral and 22,254,436 gut) at the 95% identity level. Fifty percent of all genes were "singletons," or unique to a single metagenomic sample. Singletons were enriched for different functions (compared with non-singletons) and arose from sub-population-specific microbial strains. Overall, these results provide potential bases for the unexplained heterogeneity observed in microbiome-derived human phenotypes. One the basis of these data, we built a resource, which can be accessed at https://microbial-genes.bio.

authors

  • Tierney, Braden T
  • Yang, Zhen
  • Luber, Jacob M
  • Beaudin, Marc
  • Wibowo, Marsha C
  • Baek, Christina
  • Mehlenbacher, Eleanor
  • Patel, Chirag J
  • Kostic, Aleksandar D

publication date

  • August 14, 2019

Research

keywords

  • Metagenome
  • Microbiota

Identity

PubMed Central ID

  • PMC6716383

Scopus Document Identifier

  • 85070232710

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

  • 10.1128/AEM.02164-18

PubMed ID

  • 31415755

Additional Document Info

volume

  • 26

issue

  • 2