Reconstruction of the personal information from human genome reads in gut metagenome sequencing data

Human DNA present in fecal samples can result in a small number of human reads in gut shotgun metagenomic sequencing data. However, it is currently unclear how much personal information can be reconstructed from such reads and this has not been quantitatively evaluated. Such a quantitative evaluation is necessary to clarify the ethical concerns related to data sharing and to enable the efficient use of human genetic information in stool samples, such as for research and forensics. Here, we used genomic approaches to reconstruct personal information from fecal metagenomes of 343 Japanese individuals with associated human genotype data. Our approach can be used to quantify the personal information contained within gut metagenome data.EGA study EGAS00001007027