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Regional variation limits applications of healthy gut microbiome reference ranges and disease models

An Author Correction to this article was published on 24 September 2018

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Abstract

Dysbiosis, departure of the gut microbiome from a healthy state, has been suggested to be a powerful biomarker of disease incidence and progression1,2,3. Diagnostic applications have been proposed for inflammatory bowel disease diagnosis and prognosis4, colorectal cancer prescreening5 and therapeutic choices in melanoma6. Noninvasive sampling could facilitate large-scale public health applications, including early diagnosis and risk assessment in metabolic7 and cardiovascular diseases8. To understand the generalizability of microbiota-based diagnostic models of metabolic disease, we characterized the gut microbiota of 7,009 individuals from 14 districts within 1 province in China. Among phenotypes, host location showed the strongest associations with microbiota variations. Microbiota-based metabolic disease models developed in one location failed when used elsewhere, suggesting that such models cannot be extrapolated. Interpolated models performed much better, especially in diseases with obvious microbiota-related characteristics. Interpolation efficiency decreased as geographic scale increased, indicating a need to build localized baseline and disease models to predict metabolic risks.

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Fig. 1: Overview of sampling regions and of regional variation in gut microbiota.
Fig. 2: Evaluating cross-applicability of gut microbiota–based disease models among locations.
Fig. 3: Illustration of the difficulty gradient used to interpolate and extrapolate the MetS model.

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  • 24 September 2018

    In the version of this article originally published, in the sentence “Applying the same approach to obesity (Fig. 2b), MetS (Fig. 2c) and fatty liver (Fig. 2d) yielded similar results,” two figure panels were cited incorrectly. The data for obesity are in Fig. 2c, and the data for MetS are in Fig. 2b. The sentence has been updated with the correct citations in the print, PDF and HTML versions of the article.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the contributions of the 308 local CDC investigators and registered nurses for their help with collection point maintenance and metadata and stool sample collection. We thank all volunteers who participated in this project. This study was supported by the National Projects of Major Infectious Disease Control and Prevention (2017ZX10103011 (H.W.Z.)), National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC31570497 (H.W.Z.), 31322003 (H.W.Z.), and 81671171 (J.Y.)), China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (C1090132 (Y.H.)) and the Science and Technology Planning Project of Guangdong Province, China (2015A030401055 (W.W.)).

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Contributions

Y.H., W.W., W.-J.M. and H.-W.Z. designed the study; W.W., C.-Z.H., Z.-H.C, G.-Y.J., Y.-J.X. and W.-J.M. organized data collection and trained local CDC investigators; M.-X.C., Z.-D.-X.Z., P.M., X.-J.C., Z.-H.R., L.-Y.L. and N.Y. processed the samples; Y.H., H.-M.Z., P.L., H.-F.S., X.W., C.-B.W., P.C., J.Y. and H.-W.Z. analyzed the data; Y.H., D.M., W.-J.M., R.K. and H.-W.Z. drafted the manuscript; and R.K. and J.R. offered advice regarding the design of the study, data analysis and manuscript writing.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Wen-Jun Ma or Hong-Wei Zhou.

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Competing interests

L.-Y.L., X.W. and C.-B.W. are employees of Shenzhen Fun-Poo Biotech Co., LTD.

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He, Y., Wu, W., Zheng, HM. et al. Regional variation limits applications of healthy gut microbiome reference ranges and disease models. Nat Med 24, 1532–1535 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-018-0164-x

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