Gut microbiota diversity across ethnicities in the United States

Composed of hundreds of microbial species, the composition of the human gut microbiota can vary with chronic diseases underlying health disparities that disproportionally affect ethnic minorities. However, the influence of ethnicity on the gut microbiota remains largely unexplored and lacks reproducible generalizations across studies. By distilling associations between ethnicity and differences in two United States based 16S gut microbiota datasets including 1,673 individuals, we report 12 microbial genera and families that reproducibly vary by ethnicity. Interestingly, a majority of these microbial taxa, including the most heritable bacterial family, Christensenellaceae, overlap with genetically-associated taxa and form co-occurring clusters linked by similar fermentative and methanogenic metabolic processes. These results demonstrate recurrent associations between specific taxa in the gut microbiota and ethnicity, providing hypotheses for examining specific members of the gut microbiota as mediators of health disparities.

• Publication year

  2018

• Venue

  bioRxiv

• Publication date

  2018-06-08

• Fields of study

  Biology, Sociology, Medicine, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1371/journal.pbio.2006842PMID 30513082PMCID 6279019
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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