Glycan degradation (GlyDeR) analysis predicts mammalian gut microbiota abundance and host diet-specific adaptations.

ABSTRACT:

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Glycans form the primary nutritional source for microbes in the human gut, and understanding their metabolism is a critical yet understudied aspect of microbiome research. Here, we present a novel computational pipeline for modeling glycan degradation (GlyDeR) which predicts the glycan degradation potency of 10,000 reference glycans based on either genomic or metagenomic data. We first validated GlyDeR by comparing degradation profiles for genomes in the Human Microbiome Project against KEGG reaction annotations. Next, we applied GlyDeR to the analysis of human and mammalian gut microbial communities, which revealed that the glycan degradation potential of a community is strongly linked to host diet and can be used to predict diet with higher accuracy than sequence data

SUBMITTER: Eilam O 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4145686 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature