Diet induces reproducible alterations in the mouse and human gut microbiome

SummaryThe degree to which diet reproducibly alters the human and mouse gut microbiota remains unclear. Here, we focus on the consumption of a high-fat diet (HFD), one of the most frequently studied dietary interventions in mice. We employed a subject-level meta-analysis framework for unbiased collection and analysis of publicly available 16S rRNA gene and metagenomic sequencing data from studies examining HFD in rodent models. In total, we re-analyzed 27 studies, 1101 samples, and 106 million reads mapping to 16S rRNA gene sequences. We report reproducible changes in gut microbial community structure both within and between studies, including a significant increase in the Firmicutes phylum and decrease in the Bacteroidetes phylum; however, reduced alpha diversity is not a consistent feature of HFD. Finer taxonomic analysis revealed that the strongest signal of HFD on microbiota species composition is Lactococcus spp., which we demonstrate is a common dietary contaminant through the molecular testing of dietary ingredients, culturing, microscopy, and germ-free mouse experiments. After in silico removal of Lactococcus spp., we employed machine learning to define a unique operational taxonomic unit (OTU)-based signature capable of predicting the dietary intake of mice and demonstrate that phylogenetic and gene-family transformations of this model are capable of accurately predicting human samples in controlled feeding settings (area under the receiver operator curve = 0.75 and 0.88 respectively). Together, these results demonstrate the utility of microbiome meta-analyses in identifying robust bacterial signals for mechanistic studies and creates a framework for the routine meta-analysis of microbiome studies in preclinical models.