PreprintCited by 884Gut microbiota and healthResearch Data Management PracticesMicrobial Community Ecology and Physiology

American Gut: an Open Platform for Citizen-Science Microbiome Research

Open access
McDonalda, Daniel, Hyde, Embriette, Debelius, Justine W., Morton, James T., Gonzalez, Antonio, Ackermann, Gail, Aksenov, Alexander A., Behsaz, Bahar +51 more·2018·mSystems

Preprint — published as 10.1128/msystems.00031-18 · Paper page

Abstract

Although much work has linked the human microbiome to specific phenotypes and lifestyle variables, data from different projects have been challenging to integrate and the extent of microbial and molecular diversity in human stool remains unknown. Using standardized protocols from the Earth Microbiome Project and sample contributions from over 10,000 citizen-scientists, together with an open research network, we compare human microbiome specimens primarily from the USA, UK, and Australia to one another and to environmental samples. Our results show an unexpected range of beta-diversity in human stool microbiomes as compared to environmental samples, demonstrate the utility of procedures for removing the effects of overgrowth during room-temperature shipping for revealing phenotype correlations, uncover new molecules and kinds of molecular communities in the human stool metabolome, and examine emergent associations among the microbiome, metabolome, and the diversity of plants that are consumed (rather than relying on reductive categorical variables such as veganism, which have little or no explanatory power). We also demonstrate the utility of the living data resource and cross-cohort comparison to confirm existing associations between the microbiome and psychiatric illness, and to reveal the extent of microbiome change within one individual during surgery, providing a paradigm for open microbiome research and education. Importance: We show that a citizen-science, self-selected cohort shipping samples through the mail at room temperature recaptures many known microbiome results from clinically collected cohorts and reveals new ones. Of particular interest is integrating n=1 study data with the population data, showing that the extent of microbiome change after events such as surgery can exceed differences between distinct environmental biomes, and the effect of diverse plants in the diet which we confirm with untargeted metabolomics on hundreds of samples.

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Crossref · 10.1101/277970

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  • American Gut Project participants also complete surveys about general health status, disease history, lifestyle data and food frequency.

    “These participants also complete surveys about general health status, disease history, lifestyle data and food frequency.”

    From Multimodal biomedical AI (2022) · cites this paper as [94]

    The Results section (“Cohort characteristics”) says participants reported general health status, disease history, and lifestyle data through a survey. It also says all survey questions were optional and only 14.8% completed the food-frequency questionnaire, so the sentence overstates how broadly participants completed it. (LLM, conf=0.88)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
  • The data featured in this article come from a set of 953,000 rRNA fragments sequenced from stool samples submitted by participants in the American Gut Project.

    “The data featured in this article come from a set of 953,000 rRNA fragments sequenced from stool samples submitted by participants in the AGP25, powered by TMI (https://microsetta.ucsd.edu/).”

    From Improving microbial phylogeny with citizen science within a mass-market video game (2025) · cites this paper as [25]

    The Methods sections on sample selection and participant recruitment describe fecal samples submitted by American Gut Project participants and sequencing of 16S rRNA gene fragments. The Introduction reports over 467 million fragments across the project as of May 2017, but our copy does not establish that the citing article’s dataset contains 953,000 fragments. (LLM, conf=0.88)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
  • The American Gut Project collects microbiome data from self-selected participants across several countries.

    “As another example, the American Gut Project collects microbiome data from self-selected participants across several countries 94 .”

    From Multimodal biomedical AI (2022) · cites this paper as [94]

  • BLS is designed to improve a reference multiple alignment of 1 million 16S rRNA sequences from The Microsetta Initiative's American Gut Project.

    “BLS is designed to improve a reference multiple alignment of 1 million 16S ribosomal RNA (rRNA) sequences from The Microsetta Initiative’s (TMI) American Gut Project (AGP)25, a citizen science initiative collecting gut microbial genomic data.”
  • BLS outperforms SEPP on many variables, including several linked to gut microbe diversity and human health.

    “We observed that BLS outperforms SEPP on many variables, including several that have been linked to gut microbe diversity and human health25,39–42.”

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2 of the 121 references couldn’t be matched to a known paper.

Research works printed but not linked: 2

  1. [59]National Center for Health Statistics 2016 Table 58. In Health, United States, 2015: with special feature on racial and ethnic health disparities. National Center for Health Statistics, Hyattsville, MD https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/2015/058.pdf. 27308685
  2. [68]Mantel N 1967 The detection of disease clustering and a generalized regression approach. Cancer Res 27: 209– 220. 6018555

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Authors
McDonalda, D., Hyde, E., Debelius, J. W., Morton, J. T., Gonzalez, A., Ackermann, G., Aksenov, A. A., Behsaz, B., Brennan, C., Chen, Y., Goldasich, L. D., Dorrestein, P. C., Dunn, R. R., Fahimipour, A. K., Gaffney, J., Gilbert, J. A., Gogul, G., Green, J. L., Hugenholtz, P., Humphrey, G., Huttenhower, C., Jackson, M. A., Janssen, S., Jeste, D. V., Jiang, L., Kelley, S. T., Knights, D., Kosciolek, T., Ladau, J., Leach, J., Marotz, C., Meleshko, D., Melnik, A. V., Metcalf, J. L., Mohimani, H., Montassier, E., Navas-Molina, J., Nguyen, T. T., Peddada, S., Pevzner, P., Pollard, K. S., Rahnavard, G., Robbins-Pianka, A., Sangwan, N., Shorenstein, J., Smarr, L., Song, S. J., Spector, T., Swafford, A. D., Thackray, V. G., Thompson, L. R., Tripathi, A., Vazquez-Baeza, Y., Vrbanac, A., Wischmeyer, P., Wolfe, E., Zhu, Q., The American Gut Consortium, & Knight, R.
Affiliations
  • University of California San Diego (US)
  • San Diego State University (US)
  • North Carolina State University (US)
  • University of Oregon (US)
  • Argonne National Laboratory (US)
  • The University of Queensland (AU)
  • Broad Institute (US)
  • King's College London (GB)
  • University of Minnesota (US)
  • Gladstone Institutes (US)
  • St Petersburg University (RU)
  • Colorado State University (US)
  • Carnegie Mellon University (US)
  • University of Pittsburgh (US)
  • National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (US)
  • Duke University (US)
Corresponding author
Knight, Rob
Venue
mSystems
Publisher
openRxiv
Published
2018-03-07
Volume
3
Issue
3
ISSN
2379-5077 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W2794407684
Cited by
878
References
121
Citations by year
2026: 59 · 2025: 114 · 2024: 106 · 2023: 100 · 2022: 137 · 2021: 132 · 2020: 108 · 2019: 90 · 2018: 30 · 2013: 1
FWCI
32.11
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
public-domain
Locations
  • mSystems (publishedVersion, public-domain)
  • bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) (acceptedVersion, cc-by)
  • Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • Ghent University Academic Bibliography (Ghent University) (publishedVersion, other-oa)
  • Ghent University Academic Bibliography (Ghent University) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
  • eScholarship (California Digital Library) (submittedVersion, public-domain)
  • NOAA Institutional Repository (submittedVersion, cc-by)
  • OSTI OAI (U.S. Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information) (submittedVersion, public-domain)
  • Digital Access to Libraries (submittedVersion, other-oa)
  • DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
  • DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion)
  • eScholarship (California Digital Library) (submittedVersion)
  • Research Portal (King's College London) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
  • OSTI OAI (U.S. Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information) (submittedVersion)
  • PUB – Publications at Bielefeld University (Bielefeld University) (submittedVersion)
  • Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld (Universität Bielefeld) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
  • MPG.PuRe (Max Planck Society) (submittedVersion)
Funders
  • National Science Foundation (1144807, DE-AC02–06CH11357, 1053575)
  • U.S. Department of Energy (DE‐ AC02‐06CH11357, ACI-1053575, AC02‐06CH11357, 06CH11357, DE-AC02-)
  • Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
  • Wellcome Trust
  • San Diego Supercomputer Center
  • National Institute for Health and Care Research (NF-SI-0507-10228, NF-SI-0514-10027)
  • King's College London
  • Russian Science Foundation (14‐50‐00069, 14-50-)
  • Société Nationale Française de Gastro-Entérologie
  • Walloon excellence in life sciences and biotechnology
  • University of Colorado Boulder (DE-AC02-06CH11357)
  • University of California, San Diego (DE-AC02-06CH11357)
  • Hansjörg Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, Harvard University
  • Medical Research Council (MR/N030125/1, MR/N01183X/1)
  • National Institute of General Medical Sciences (T32GM007752)
  • National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (P30DK042086, P30DK043351)
Topics
  • Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Gut microbiota and health
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Research Data Management Practices
  • Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Ecology › Microbial Community Ecology and Physiology
Keywords
citizen science, microbiome research, untargeted metabolomics, gut microbiota

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