Meta-Analysis Reveals Reproducible Gut Microbiome Alterations in Response to a High-Fat Diet

Multiple research groups have shown that diet impacts the gut microbiome; however, variability in experimental design and quantitative assessment have made it challenging to assess the degree to which similar diets have reproducible effects across studies. Through an unbiased subject-level meta-analysis framework, we re-analyzed 27 dietary studies including 1,101 samples from rodents and humans. We demonstrate that a high-fat diet (HFD) reproducibly changes gut microbial community structure. Finer taxonomic analysis revealed that the most reproducible signals of a HFD are Lactococcus species, which we experimentally demonstrate to be common dietary contaminants. Additionally, a machine-learning approach defined a signature that predicts the dietary intake of mice and demonstrated that phylogenetic and gene-centric transformations of this model can be translated to humans. Together, these results demonstrate the utility of microbiome meta-analyses in identifying robust and reproducible features for mechanistic studies in preclinical models.