RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Environmental factors dominate over host genetics in shaping human gut microbiota composition
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 150540
DO 10.1101/150540
A1 Daphna Rothschild
A1 Omer Weissbrod
A1 Elad Barkan
A1 Tal Korem
A1 David Zeevi
A1 Paul I Costea
A1 Anastasia Godneva
A1 Iris Kalka
A1 Noam Bar
A1 Niv Zmora
A1 Meirav Pevsner-Fischer
A1 David Israeli
A1 Noa Kosower
A1 Gal Malka
A1 Bat Chen Wolf
A1 Tali Avnit-Sagi
A1 Maya Lotan-Pompan
A1 Adina Weinberger
A1 Zamir Halpern
A1 Shai Carmi
A1 Eran Elinav
A1 Eran Segal
YR 2017
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/06/18/150540.abstract
AB Human gut microbiome composition is shaped by multiple host intrinsic and extrinsic factors, but the relative contribution of host genetic compared to environmental factors remains elusive. Here, we genotyped a cohort of 696 healthy individuals from several distinct ancestral origins and a relatively common environment, and demonstrate that there is no statistically significant association between microbiome composition and ethnicity, single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), or overall genetic similarity, and that only 5 of 211 (2.4%) previously reported microbiome-SNP associations replicate in our cohort. In contrast, we find similarities in the microbiome composition of genetically unrelated individuals who share a household. We define the term biome-explainability as the variance of a host phenotype explained by the microbiome after accounting for the contribution of human genetics. Consistent with our finding that microbiome and host genetics are largely independent, we find significant biome-explainability levels of 16-33% for body mass index (BMI), fasting glucose, high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol, waist circumference, waist-hip ratio (WHR), and lactose consumption. We further show that several human phenotypes can be predicted substantially more accurately when adding microbiome data to host genetics data, and that the contribution of both data sources to prediction accuracy is largely additive. Overall, our results suggest that human microbiome composition is dominated by environmental factors rather than by host genetics.