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A Taxonomic Signature of Obesity in the Microbiome? Getting to the Guts of the Matter

Obesity is an important and intractable public health problem. In addition to the well-known risk factors of behavior, diet, and genetics, gut microbial communities were recently identified as another possible source of risk and a potential therapeutic target. However, human and animal-model studies...

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Autores principales: Finucane, Mariel M., Sharpton, Thomas J., Laurent, Timothy J., Pollard, Katherine S.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2014
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3885756/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24416266
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0084689
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author Finucane, Mariel M.
Sharpton, Thomas J.
Laurent, Timothy J.
Pollard, Katherine S.
author_facet Finucane, Mariel M.
Sharpton, Thomas J.
Laurent, Timothy J.
Pollard, Katherine S.
author_sort Finucane, Mariel M.
collection PubMed
description Obesity is an important and intractable public health problem. In addition to the well-known risk factors of behavior, diet, and genetics, gut microbial communities were recently identified as another possible source of risk and a potential therapeutic target. However, human and animal-model studies have yielded conflicting results about the precise nature of associations between microbiome composition and obesity. In this paper, we use publicly available data from the Human Microbiome Project (HMP) and MetaHIT, both surveys of healthy adults that include obese individuals, plus two smaller studies that specifically examined lean versus obese adults. We find that inter-study variability in the taxonomic composition of stool microbiomes far exceeds differences between lean and obese individuals within studies. Our analyses further reveal a high degree of variability in stool microbiome composition and diversity across individuals. While we confirm the previously published small, but statistically significant, differences in phylum-level taxonomic composition between lean and obese individuals in several cohorts, we find no association between BMI and taxonomic composition of stool microbiomes in the larger HMP and MetaHIT datasets. We explore a range of different statistical techniques and show that this result is robust to the choice of methodology. Differences between studies are likely due to a combination of technical and clinical factors. We conclude that there is no simple taxonomic signature of obesity in the microbiota of the human gut.
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spelling pubmed-38857562014-01-10 A Taxonomic Signature of Obesity in the Microbiome? Getting to the Guts of the Matter Finucane, Mariel M. Sharpton, Thomas J. Laurent, Timothy J. Pollard, Katherine S. PLoS One Research Article Obesity is an important and intractable public health problem. In addition to the well-known risk factors of behavior, diet, and genetics, gut microbial communities were recently identified as another possible source of risk and a potential therapeutic target. However, human and animal-model studies have yielded conflicting results about the precise nature of associations between microbiome composition and obesity. In this paper, we use publicly available data from the Human Microbiome Project (HMP) and MetaHIT, both surveys of healthy adults that include obese individuals, plus two smaller studies that specifically examined lean versus obese adults. We find that inter-study variability in the taxonomic composition of stool microbiomes far exceeds differences between lean and obese individuals within studies. Our analyses further reveal a high degree of variability in stool microbiome composition and diversity across individuals. While we confirm the previously published small, but statistically significant, differences in phylum-level taxonomic composition between lean and obese individuals in several cohorts, we find no association between BMI and taxonomic composition of stool microbiomes in the larger HMP and MetaHIT datasets. We explore a range of different statistical techniques and show that this result is robust to the choice of methodology. Differences between studies are likely due to a combination of technical and clinical factors. We conclude that there is no simple taxonomic signature of obesity in the microbiota of the human gut. Public Library of Science 2014-01-08 /pmc/articles/PMC3885756/ /pubmed/24416266 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0084689 Text en © 2014 Finucane et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Finucane, Mariel M.
Sharpton, Thomas J.
Laurent, Timothy J.
Pollard, Katherine S.
A Taxonomic Signature of Obesity in the Microbiome? Getting to the Guts of the Matter
title A Taxonomic Signature of Obesity in the Microbiome? Getting to the Guts of the Matter
title_full A Taxonomic Signature of Obesity in the Microbiome? Getting to the Guts of the Matter
title_fullStr A Taxonomic Signature of Obesity in the Microbiome? Getting to the Guts of the Matter
title_full_unstemmed A Taxonomic Signature of Obesity in the Microbiome? Getting to the Guts of the Matter
title_short A Taxonomic Signature of Obesity in the Microbiome? Getting to the Guts of the Matter
title_sort taxonomic signature of obesity in the microbiome? getting to the guts of the matter
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3885756/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24416266
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0084689
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