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Little Evidence Showed for Consistent Diversity-disease Relationship in Human Microbiome Associated Diseases

May 06, 2019

A growing list of diseases including obesity, inflammatory bowel disease, and type-I diabetes, have been found to be associated with the human microbiome, in particular with the human gut microbiome. The main reason that they were termed human microbiome associate diseases (MADs) is that whether the microbiome is a cause or a consequence of the disease is still unclear in majority of cases. At this stage, the mechanistic and/or etiological studies of the MAD are still preliminary or even lacking.

A standard analysis in human MADs is the comparison of replicated samples of microbiome diversity (usually measured with the number of microbial species or other more comprehensive metrics such as Shannon’s entropy) in healthy versus diseased. However, statistical tests or metrics that are standardized for sampling effects were not used in some of the analyses.

In a paper published last week in The ISME Journal, a research team led by Prof. MA Zhanshan from Kunming Institute of Zoology of Chinese Academy of Sciences and Prof. Nicholas Gotelli from University of Vermont discovered that there is a statistical difference in the microbiome diversity of healthy versus diseased individuals in only approximately 1/3 of the cases.

Using rigorous statistical tests developed by ecologists, researchers compared the richness of microbiome species and developed two new simulation algorithms to compare microbiome species composition.

For species richness, in only approximately 1/3 of the tested cases, the MAD diseases and microbiome diversity are related. In the remaining cases, the differences were no larger than expected by chance. However, in most studies there were significant differences in microbiome species composition between diseased and healthy individuals, which could help researchers in the development of diagnostic tests and early warning indicators of disease.

The finding highlights the importance of further mechanistic and/or etiological studies for deepening the inquiry into this important category of human diseases, and ultimately, for more precise and personalized diagnosis and treatments.

The research team has been investigating the relationships between MADs and other alternative ecological indicators, as well as the possible ecological/etiological mechanisms underlying the “1/3 diversity-disease relationship (DDR) conjecture”.

Contact

HE Linxi

Kunming Institute of Zoology

E-mail:

Diversity-disease relationships and shared species analyses for human microbiome-associated diseases

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