Implementing new method to resolve human gut microbiome structure on strain level and reveal the relationship with obesity.

Gut microbiome has become an area of major interest due to its close relationship to human health. Traditional methods resolve only on species level. However, inter-individual and within-individual variation in human microbiome occurs at finer scale. We have developed the strain-level gut microbiome profiling protocol which enables high-resolution analysis that is amenable to high-throughput approaches and provides opportunities to test the hypothesis that sub-species level bacterial population has personal characteristics and its turnover impacts human health. On an obesity research, it reveals that the community of E. coli in human gut microbiota shows personal and proprietary structure which associates to health. Promotion of the method might be implemented on other species in many kinds of microbiome studies.