Meta‐analyses of human gut microbes associated with obesity and IBD

Recent studies have linked human gut microbes to obesity and inflammatory bowel disease, but consistent signals have been difficult to identify. Here we test for indicator taxa and general features of the microbiota that are generally consistent across studies of obesity and of IBD, focusing on studies involving high‐throughput sequencing of the 16S rRNA gene (which we could process using a common computational pipeline). We find that IBD has a consistent signature across studies and allows high classification accuracy of IBD from non‐IBD subjects, but that although subjects can be classified as lean or obese within each individual study with statistically significant accuracy, consistent with the ability of…

• HH
  Howard Hughes Medical Institute
• CA
  Crohn's and Colitis Foundation of America
• NI
  National Institutes of Health