Person:

Nguyen, Long

Few studies have formally tested the interaction between diet and the gut microbiome in the context of cardiometabolic health, particularly with the microbiome considered as a potential mediator rather than a target of dietary effects. Here, we investigated 307 male participants in the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study who provided up to four stool samples each, yielding 925 shotgun metagenomes and 340 metatranscriptomes, long-term dietary information, and biomarkers of glucose homeostasis, lipid metabolism, and inflammation from blood samples. We demonstrate that a healthy Mediterranean-style dietary pattern is associated with functional and taxonomic components of the gut microbiome, and that its protective associations with cardiometabolic health vary, depending on microbial composition. In particular, the protective association between adherence to the Mediterranean diet and cardiometabolic disease risk was significantly stronger among participants with decreased abundance of Prevotella copri. Our findings represent a step forward in the concept of precision nutrition and have the potential to inform more effective and precise dietary approaches for the prevention of cardiometabolic disease mediated through alterations in the gut microbiome.

A lack of prospective studies has been a major barrier for assessing the role of the microbiome in human health and disease on a population-wide scale. To address this significant knowledge gap, we have launched a large-scale collection targeting fecal and oral microbiome specimens from 20,000 women within the Nurses’ Health Study II cohort (the Microbiome among Nurses, or Micro-N study). Leveraging the rich epidemiologic data that have been repeatedly collected from this cohort since 1989; the established biorepository of archived blood, urine, buccal cell, and tumor tissue specimens; the available genetic and biomarker data; the cohort's ongoing follow-up; and the BIOM-Mass microbiome research platform, Micro-N furnishes unparalleled resources for future prospective studies to interrogate the interplay between host, environmental factors, and the microbiome in human health. These prospectively collected materials will provide much-needed evidence to infer causality in microbiome-associated outcomes, paving the way towards development of microbiota-targeted modulators, preventives, diagnostics and therapeutics. Here, we describe a generalizable, scalable and cost-effective platform used for stool and oral microbiome specimen and metadata collection in the Micro-N study as an example of how prospective studies of the microbiome may be carried out.