Genetic determinants of the gut microbiome in UK Twins

By Julia Goodrich, Emily R. Davenport, M. Beaumont, M. Jackson, Rob Knight, Carole Ober, Tim D. Spector, Jordana T. Bell, Andrew G. Clark, Ruth E. Ley. Cell Host and Microbe, 2016

960 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Summary Studies in mice and humans have revealed intriguing associations between host genetics and the microbiome. Here we report a 16S rRNA-based analysis of the gut microbiome in 1,126 twin pairs, a subset of which was previously reported. Tripling the sample narrowed the confidence intervals around heritability estimates and uncovered additional heritable taxa, some of which are validated in other studies. Repeat sampling of subjects showed heritable taxa to be temporally stable. A candidate gene approach uncovered associations between heritable taxa and genes related to diet, metabolism and olfaction. We replicate an association between Bifidobacterium and the lactase (LCT) gene locus and identify an association between the host gene ALDH1L1 and SHA-98 bacteria, suggesting a link between formate production and blood pressure. Additional genes detected are involved in barrier defense and self/non-self recognition. Our results indicate that diet-sensing, metabolism, and immune defense are important drivers of human-microbiome co-evolution.

Subfields: Molecular Biology, Pediatrics, Perinatology and Child Health, Physiology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5ef52f73e599d89f32918b00ff57975bc8a7f288

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In Molecular Biology

Citations in the corpus

The fecal metabolome as a functional readout of the gut microbiome (2018, positive): “The gut microbiome is heritable17,18 and we found a heritable variance component for 210 OTUs, which explained on average 22.7% of the observed total variance.”
Geography, Ethnicity or Subsistence-Specific Variations in Human Microbiome Composition and Diversity (2017, background): “The role of host genetics in shaping the GM is not very clear yet (Goodrich et al., 2016), though there were some reports on ethnicity or geography-specific variations in GM (Yatsunenko et al.”
Effect of Diet on the Gut Microbiota: Rethinking Intervention Duration (2019, neutral): “8% according to a 2016 data analysis of 1126 twins [7].”
An integrated metagenomics pipeline for strain profiling reveals novel patterns of bacterial transmission and biogeography (2016, background): “Recent studies have found significant overlap in species between mothers and their infants over the first year of life (Backhed et al. 2015; Bokulich et al. 2016), and many microbial taxa that are heritable (Goodrich et al. 2016).”