Shared environments complicate the use of strain-resolved metagenomics to infer microbiome transmission.

ABSTRACT:

Background

In humans and other social animals, social partners have more similar microbiomes than expected by chance, suggesting that social contact transfers microorganisms. Yet, social microbiome transmission can be difficult to identify based on compositional data alone. To overcome this challenge, recent studies have used information about microbial strain sharing (i.e., the shared presence of highly similar microbial sequences) to infer transmission. However, the degree to which strain sharing is influenced by shared traits and environments among social partners, rather than transmission per se, is not well understood.

Results

Here, we first use a fecal microbiota transplant dataset to show that strain sharing can recapitulate true transmission networks under ideal sett

SUBMITTER: Debray R 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11869744 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature