Microbes with higher metabolic independence are enriched in human gut microbiomes under stress

2024/11/20 by Iva Veseli, Yiqun T. Chen, Matthew S. Schechter +10 · 1 voice · 7 citations
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Medicine · #Bioinformatics #Biology #Diet and metabolism studies #Disease #Dysbiosis #Ecology #Gut flora #Gut microbiota and health #Human microbiome #Immunology #Inflammatory bowel disease #Medicine #Metabolomics and Mass Spectrometry Studies #Microbiome #Pathology

paper · doi:10.7554/elife.89862.2

published in eLife (eLife Sciences Publications Ltd)

openalex publication_date 2024/11/20 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/14

Abstract

Abstract A wide variety of human diseases are associated with loss of microbial diversity in the human gut, inspiring a great interest in the diagnostic or therapeutic potential of the microbiota. However, the ecological forces that drive diversity reduction in disease states remain unclear, rendering it difficult to ascertain the role of the microbiota in disease emergence or severity. One hypothesis to explain this phenomenon is that microbial diversity is diminished as disease states select for microbial populations that are more fit to survive environmental stress caused by inflammation or other host factors. Here, we tested this hypothesis on a large scale, by developing a software framework to quantify the enrichment of microbial metabolisms in complex metagenomes as a function of microbial diversity. We applied this framework to over 400 gut metagenomes from individuals who are healthy or diagnosed with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). We found that high metabolic independence (HMI) is a distinguishing characteristic of microbial communities associated with individuals diagnosed with IBD. A classifier we trained using the normalized copy numbers of 33 HMI-associated metabolic modules not only distinguished states of health versus IBD, but also tracked the recovery of the gut microbiome following antibiotic treatment, suggesting that HMI is a hallmark of microbial communities in stressed gut environments.

Citations

• The Gut Microbiome and Inflammatory Bowel Diseases

Cited by

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• Genomic insights into the functional and metabolic versatility of gut microbiome Anaerostipes species. [europepmc]
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Discussions

• Gut stress as in inflammatory bowel disease (#IBD) favors microbes that thrive more independently of other components of gut #microbiome. https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.89862.2 [bsky, 24 points, 0 comments]

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