Identifying personal microbiomes using metagenomic codes
Abstract
Recent surveys of the microbial communities living on and in the human body—the human microbiome—have revealed strong variation in community membership between individuals. Some of this variation is stable over time, leading to speculation that individuals might possess unique microbial “fingerprints” that distinguish them from the population. We rigorously evaluated this idea by combining concepts from microbial ecology and computer science. Our results demonstrated that individuals could be uniquely identified among populations of 100s based on their microbiomes alone. In the case of the gut microbiome, >80% of individuals could still be uniquely identified up to a year later—a result that raises potential privacy concerns for subjects enrolled in human microbiome research projects.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Pub Defense Publication
- Publication Date
- May 11, 2015
- Source ID
- 10.1073/pnas.1423854112
Entities
People
- Brendan Bohannan
- Curtis Huttenhower
- Dirk Gevers
- Eric A. Franzosa
- James F. Meadow
- Katherine Huang
- Katherine P. Lemon
Organizations
- Army Research Office
- Broad Institute
- Harvard Medical School
- Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
- National Institutes of Health
- National Science Foundation
- University of Oregon