Human gut resistome can be country-specific

Area of Science:

• Microbiology
• Genetics
• Public Health

Background:

• Antibiotic resistance is a major global health threat.
• The human gut microbiome harbors a vast collection of antibiotic resistance genes (the gut resistome).
• Factors like antibiotic consumption influence the gut resistome, potentially leading to national variations.

Purpose of the Study:

• To quantitatively characterize national differences in the human gut resistome.
• To assess if the gut resistome can reliably identify an individual's nationality.
• To investigate the impact of country-specific factors on gut resistome composition.

Main Methods:

• Analysis of a large dataset comprising 1,267 human gut samples from America, China, Denmark, and Spain.
• Development and application of a stacking machine-learning model.
• Utilizing the gut resistome as the sole feature for nationality identification.

Main Results:

• The machine learning model achieved high accuracy in identifying nationalities: F1 scores ranged from 0.964 (American) to 0.987 (Chinese).
• Significant differences in gut resistome composition were observed among the studied nationalities.
• The gut resistome proved to be a reliable indicator of an individual's country of origin.

Conclusions:

• Nationalities exhibit distinct gut resistome profiles.
• The gut resistome can serve as a reliable biomarker for nationality.
• Findings underscore the importance of country-specific factors in shaping the human gut resistome and have implications for public health policy.