Transplantation of Human Gut Microbiota into Germ-Free Mice

Transplanting human gut microbiota into germ-free (GF) mice is a popular approach to disentangle cause-and-effect relationships between complex microbial communities and the development of disease. Recently, progress in algorithm development, such as DADA2, has allowed for identification of high-confidence sequence variants (SVs) from bulk 16S sequencing data. Identification of these variants allows for a detailed examination of which taxa move from the human host to the mouse and how the relative abundance of each variant in humans is replicated —or fails to replicate— when introduced into formerly GF mice. Using the DADA2 pipeline and also a large sample size of germ-free mice this study aims to provide a high-resolution picture of the transfer efficiency of human microbial communities into GF mice.