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BiomeGPT: A foundation model for the human gut microbiome

Medearis, N. A.; Zhu, S.; Zomorrodi, A. R.

2026-01-05 bioinformatics
10.64898/2026.01.05.697599 bioRxiv
Show abstract

The human gut microbiome encodes rich information about host health, yet current analysis pipelines remain narrowly optimized for individual tasks. This limits our ability to gain a thorough view of how the microbiome impacts health and disease. Here we introduce BiomeGPT, a transformer-based foundation model pretrained on over 13,300 human gut metagenomes spanning 32 phenotypes--including healthy and 31 diverse diseases--to learn context-aware, species-level gut microbiome representations. The model captures quantitative compositional structure and intricate cross-species dependencies embedded within community profiles. When fine-tuned for predicting host health status, BiomeGPT accurately distinguishes healthy from diseased microbiomes and resolves individual disease states across a broad clinical spectrum. Furthermore, its attention patterns reveal biologically plausible microbial signatures, highlighting both shared and disease-specific microbial species linked to host phenotypes. By providing a unified, scalable framework for species-level gut microbiome representation learning and prediction, BiomeGPT enables new avenues for biomarker discovery, disease stratification, and microbiome-driven precision medicine.

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