美国芝加哥大学Ran Blekhman课题组报道，整合168000个样本揭示了人类肠道微生物群的全局模式。相关论文于2025年1月22日在线发表于国际学术期刊《细胞》。

研究人员表示，塑造人类微生物组变异的因素是生物医学研究的主要焦点。虽然其他领域通过使用大规模测序合集来提取需要庞大样本量才能获得的见解，但微生物组领域缺乏一个类似规模的资源，来对常用的16S rRNA基因扩增子测序进行分析，从而量化微生物组的组成。

为填补这一空白，研究人员处理了168464个公开可得的人类肠道微生物组样本，并采用统一的处理流程。研究人员利用这个合集评估了地理和技术因素对微生物组变异的影响。研究人员发现，像中亚和南亚等地区的微生物组，与欧洲和北美等更为充分表征的微生物组相比，差异显著，并且仅凭组成就可以预测样本的来源地区。

研究人员还发现，微生物组变异与技术因素，如引物和DNA提取方法之间存在较强的关联。研究人员预期，随着人类微生物组合集的不断发展，它将促进更深入的应用和方法学研究。

附：英文原文

Title: Integration of 168,000 samples reveals global patterns of the human gut microbiome

Author: Richard J. Abdill, Samantha P. Graham, Vincent Rubinetti, Mansooreh Ahmadian, Parker Hicks, Ashwin Chetty, Daniel McDonald, Pamela Ferretti, Elizabeth Gibbons, Marco Rossi, Arjun Krishnan, Frank W. Albert, Casey S. Greene, Sean Davis, Ran Blekhman

Issue&Volume: 2025-01-22

Abstract: The factors shaping human microbiome variation are a major focus of biomedical research. While other fields have used large sequencing compendia to extract insights requiring otherwise impractical sample sizes, the microbiome field has lacked a comparably sized resource for the 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing commonly used to quantify microbiome composition. To address this gap, we processed 168,464 publicly available human gut microbiome samples with a uniform pipeline. We use this compendium to evaluate geographic and technical effects on microbiome variation. We find that regions such as Central and Southern Asia differ significantly from the more thoroughly characterized microbiomes of Europe and Northern America and that composition alone can be used to predict a sample’s region of origin. We also find strong associations between microbiome variation and technical factors such as primers and DNA extraction. We anticipate this growing work, the Human Microbiome Compendium, will enable advanced applied and methodological research.

DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2024.12.017

Source: https://www.cell.com/cell/abstract/S0092-8674(24)01430-2