Humans have co-evolved with a complex mutualistic microbiota, organized into distinct communities in a range of body habitats, upon which we rely for our health. Periodic exposure of these microbial communities to potent antibiotics has become common in both the developed and developing world, a situation that is unprecedented in our evolutionary history. Such exposures lead to immediate, profound changes in the composition of the human microbiota. Despite the apparent overall robustness of these communities, some antibiotic-induced changes in composition appear to be stable. Functional changes in the community may also occur, but have scarcely been examined. These changes are worrisome, because many beneficial interactions between microbes and the human host are specific to particular strains; related strains that fill the same ecological niche within the community may not have the same beneficial interactions with the host. An understanding of the effects of antibiotics on human-microbe interactions remains fragmentary in part because effective, high-throughput tools for addressing the composition, functional potential and interactions within such complex communities have only recently become available, and data addressing the routine temporal variation in the composition and function of the gut microbiota in the absence of disturbance are scarce. The broad, long-term objectives of the proposed work are to understand the routine temporal variability in composition and function of the human gut microbiota, to discover factors contributing to the stability and resilience (or lack thereof) of these communities after disturbance by a course of antibiotics, and to characterize inter-individual differences in the compositional and functional dynamics, and in the relationship between composition and function over time.
Specific Aim 1. Characterize the temporal dynamics of the taxonomic composition of the gut microbiota in healthy human adults over 36 weeks in the absence of deliberate disturbance, based on deep sequencing of 16S rRNA genes in weekly fecal samples in 10 subjects, and multivariate and time series analyses.
Specific Aim 2. Characterize the temporal dynamics of the functional gene content and of the chemical milieu of the gut microbiota in healthy human adults over 36 weeks in the absence of deliberate disturbance, based on shotgun DNA sequencing and metabolomic analysis of a subset of the weekly fecal samples from Aim 1, and multivariate coinertia-based tools.
Specific Aim 3. Characterize the impact of a short course of an antibiotic on the taxonomic composition, functional gene content, and chemical milieu of the gut microbiota in healthy human adults, based on deep sequencing of 16S rRNA genes, shotgun DNA sequencing and metabolomic analysis of weekly fecal samples from 20 healthy subjects collected over 25 weeks (with a course of ciprofloxacin during week 13).

Public Health Relevance

Humans rely on the microbial communities that colonize the gut for a wide variety of critical functions, including nutrition, immune system maturation, protection against infection by disease-causing microbes, and detoxification of environmental chemicals. Antibiotics, although sometimes necessary for disease treatment, have detrimental, but poorly understood effects on the health-associated human microbial communities. We propose to characterize these effects, with the long-term goal of being able to predict and avoid the damaging impact of antibiotics on human health.

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS)
Type
Research Project (R01)
Project #
5R01GM099534-03
Application #
8790758
Study Section
Special Emphasis Panel (ZGM1-GDB-2 (MC))
Program Officer
Sledjeski, Darren D
Project Start
2012-12-17
Project End
2016-11-30
Budget Start
2014-12-01
Budget End
2015-11-30
Support Year
3
Fiscal Year
2015
Total Cost
$248,865
Indirect Cost
$68,865
Name
Palo Alto Veterans Institute for Research
Department
Type
DUNS #
624218814
City
Palo Alto
State
CA
Country
United States
Zip Code
94304
Relman, David A; Lipsitch, Marc (2018) Microbiome as a tool and a target in the effort to address antimicrobial resistance. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 115:12902-12910
Nguyen, Lan Huong; Holmes, Susan (2017) Bayesian Unidimensional Scaling for visualizing uncertainty in high dimensional datasets with latent ordering of observations. BMC Bioinformatics 18:394
Hahn, Aria S; Altman, Tomer; Konwar, Kishori M et al. (2017) A geographically-diverse collection of 418 human gut microbiome pathway genome databases. Sci Data 4:170035
Callahan, Benjamin; Proctor, Diana; Relman, David et al. (2016) REPRODUCIBLE RESEARCH WORKFLOW IN R FOR THE ANALYSIS OF PERSONALIZED HUMAN MICROBIOME DATA. Pac Symp Biocomput 21:183-94
Gorvitovskaia, Anastassia; Holmes, Susan P; Huse, Susan M (2016) Interpreting Prevotella and Bacteroides as biomarkers of diet and lifestyle. Microbiome 4:15
Bik, Elisabeth M; Relman, David A (2014) Unrest at home: diarrheal disease and microbiota disturbance. Genome Biol 15:120
Relman, David A (2014) ""Inconvenient truths"" in the pursuit of scientific knowledge and public health. J Infect Dis 209:170-2
Modi, Sheetal R; Collins, James J; Relman, David A (2014) Antibiotics and the gut microbiota. J Clin Invest 124:4212-8
Sun, Christine L; Relman, David A (2013) Microbiota's 'little helpers': bacteriophages and antibiotic-associated responses in the gut microbiome. Genome Biol 14:127
Debs, John E; Robins, Nicholas P; Close, John D (2013) Physics. Measuring mass in seconds. Science 339:532-3