Social and environmental predictors of gut microbiome age in wild baboons

Understanding why some individuals age faster than others is essential to evolutionary biology and geroscience, but measuring variation in biological age is difficult. One solution may lie in measuring gut microbiome composition because microbiota change with many age-related factors (e.g., immunity and behavior). Here we create a microbiome-based age predictor using 13,563 gut microbial profiles from 479 wild baboons collected over 14 years. The resulting “microbiome clock” predicts host chronological age. Deviations from the clock’s predictions are linked to demographic and socio-environmental factors that predict baboon health and survival: animals who appear old-for-age tend to be male, sampled in the dry season (for females), and high social status (both sexes). However, an individual’s “microbiome age” does not predict the attainment of developmental milestones or lifespan. Hence, the microbiome clock accurately reflects age and some social and environmental conditions, but not th..., , , # Social and environmental predictors of gut microbiome age in wild baboons

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.b2rbnzspv](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.b2rbnzspv)

This dataset consists of anonymized baboon data originally used to understand how to predict host age from 16S rRNA gut microbiome data.   

## Description of the data and file structure

I simplified the main data required for this paper into the following four files:

* IDTAXA_silva_assignment.rds is all the taxonomic assignments from SILVA_SSU_r132_March2018.RData. The specific ASVs are the rows and the columns are the taxonomic classification for those ASVs. 
* merged_baboon_data_with_metadata_preset_more_blanks_greater_1000.rds is a lightly processed ASV table. The rows correspond to the sample ID (named DADA_id in the metadata file), and the columns correspond to specific ASVs. 
* metadata_full.rds is an extremely wide metadata table (13524x83) that should include all the associated demographic, social, and environmental d...