Gut Flora - Predicting A Human Gut Microbiota

Predicting A Human Gut Microbiota

Common sense dictates that there should be a relationship between diet and the composition of gut microbiota. But, is this relationship strong enough so that we can predict changes in the microbiota given a certain diet?

With a series of experiments using gnotobiotic mice, scientists have demonstrated that it is possible to predict changes in the human gut microbiota. They reproduced a model human gut community of ten sequenced human gut bacteria in mice and followed changes in community composition in response to changes in host diet.

Using several diets with different concentrations of four ingredients, casein, corn oil, cornstarch, and sucrose, it is possible to feed a linear model to predict the abundance of each species as a function of diet. This model is able to predict 61% of population variation.

Total community abundance (biomass) and the abundance of each community member can best be explained by changes in casein consumption. Seven of these species are positively correlated with the concentration of casein and the other three species are negatively correlated with casein concentration.

The scientists also studied some diets consisting of random combinations of human pureed baby food and administered these diets to the mice. In this way, the diets were closer to real human diets. Again, the linear model could predict the 60% of the variation in species abundance knowing the concentrations of the components of the diets.