A Universal Gut Metagenomic-Derived Signature Predicts Cirrhosis

Dysregulation of the gut microbiome has been implicated in the progression of nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) to advanced fibrosis and cirrhosis. To determine the diagnostic capacity of this association, stool microbiomes were compared across 163 well-characterized participants encompassing non-NAFLD controls, NAFLD-cirrhosis patients and their first-degree relatives. Interrogation of shotgun metagenomic and untargeted metabolomic profiles using the Random Forest machine learning algorithm and differential abundance analysis identified discrete metagenomic and metabolomic signatures that were similarly effective in detecting cirrhosis (diagnostic accuracy 0.91, AUC). Combining the metagenomic signature with age and serum albumin levels accurately distinguished cirrhosis in etiologically and genetically distinct cohorts from geographically separated regions. Additional inclusion of serum aspartate aminotransferase levels, which are increased in cirrhosis patients, enabled discrimination of cirrhosis from earlier stages of fibrosis. These findings demonstrate that a core set of gut microbiome species may offer universal utility as a non-invasive diagnostic test for cirrhosis.

Type: Other
Archiver: European Genome-Phenome Archive (EGA)

1 Dataset 1 Publication

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Dataset ID	Description	Technology	Samples
EGAD00001006364	DNA extraction from human stool samples was performed at the Center for Microbiome Innovation (CMI) at University of California, San Diego. DNA sequencing libraries were prepared using Nextera XT (Illumina). Shotgun DNA sequencing was performed on the Illumina HiSeq4000 platform. Raw fastq reads were quality-checked. Skewer (version 0.2.2) was utilized with the paired-end mode. Human reads were identified and removed by Bowtie2 mapping against the human genome reference (hg19), followed by bam2fastq with --unaligned --no-aligned --force options.		162

Publications	Citations
Early prediction of incident liver disease using conventional risk factors and gut-microbiome-augmented gradient boosting. Liu Y, Méric G, Havulinna AS, Teo SM, Åberg F, Ruuskanen M, Sanders J, Zhu Q, Tripathi A, Verspoor K, Cheng S, Jain M, Jousilahti P, Vázquez-Baeza Y, Loomba R, Lahti L, Niiranen T, Salomaa V, Knight R, Inouye M. Cell Metab 34: 2022 719-730.e4	32