Early life microbial succession in the gut follows common patterns in humans across the globe

Area of Science:

• Microbiology
• Developmental Biology
• Bioinformatics

Background:

• Understanding infant gut microbiome dynamics is vital for child health.
• No existing normative model accurately tracks early gut microbial development.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a normative model for infant gut microbiome maturation.
• To estimate infant age using microbial taxonomic data with high temporal resolution.

Main Methods:

• Trained a random forest model on 3154 metagenomic samples from 1827 infants globally.
• Utilized gut microbial taxonomic relative abundances to predict child age.
• Analyzed key taxonomic predictors and functional gene trends.

Main Results:

• Achieved a root mean square error of 2.56 months in age estimation.
• Identified key microbial shifts, including decreasing Bifidobacterium spp. and increasing Faecalibacterium prausnitzii.
• Demonstrated conserved microbial succession patterns across diverse populations, indicating universal developmental trajectories.

Conclusions:

• The developed model provides a reliable
• microbiome age
• benchmark for assessing early gut maturation.
• Microbial succession in the infant gut follows conserved, universal developmental pathways.
• This tool can complement existing measures of child development.