Two Competing Guilds as a Core Microbiome Signature for Health Recovery

Summary ParagraphOver eons of co-evolution, the gut microbiota has become an essential organ for humans1,2. However, it is unclear what core members and their ecological organization ensures the stable provision of this organs essential health-relevant functions to the host. With high quality metagenome-assembled genomes as network nodes, here we identified two competing guilds3 of the most stably and highly connected bacteria that together correlate with a wide range of host health conditions. Genomes in these two guilds kept their ecological relationship unchanged despite experiencing profound abundance changes during a 3-month high fiber intervention and 1-year follow-up in patients with type 2 diabetes (T2DM). The genomes of one guild harbored more genes for plant polysaccharide degradation and butyrate production, while the other guild had more genes for virulence or antibiotic resistance. A Random Forest regression model showed that the abundance distributions of these genomes were associated with 41 out of 43 bio-clinical parameters in the study cohort. With these genomes as reference, Random Forest modeling successfully classified case and control of T2DM, atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease, liver cirrhosis, inflammatory bowel diseases, colorectal cancer, ankylosing spondylitis, schizophrenia, and Parkinsons disease in 12 independent metagenomic datasets from 1,816 participants across ethnicity and geography. This core microbiome signature may serve as a common target for health recovery.