A Predictive Index for Health Status Using Species-level Gut Microbiome Profiling. Human gut metagenome

Providing insight into ones health status from a gut microbiome sample is an important clinical goal in current human microbiome research. Herein, we introduce Gut Microbiome Health Index (GMHI), a biologically-interpretable mathematical formula for predicting the likelihood of disease irrespective of the diagnosis. GMHI is formulated upon 50 microbial species associated with healthy gut ecosystems. These species are identified through a multi-study, integrative analysis on 4,347 human stool metagenomes from 34 published studies across healthy and 12 different non-healthy conditions, i.e., disease or abnormal bodyweight. When demonstrated on our population-scale meta-dataset, GMHI is the most robust and consistent predictor of disease presence (or absence) compared to alpha-diversity indices. Validation on 679 samples from 9 additional studies results in a balanced accuracy of 73.7% in distinguishing healthy from non-healthy groups. Our findings suggest that gut taxonomic signatures can predict health status, and highlight how data sharing efforts can provide broadly-applicable discoveries.