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Human Skin, Oral, and Gut Microbiomes Predict Chronological Age
Open accessAbstract
Considerable evidence suggests that the gut microbiome changes with age or even accelerates aging in adults. Whether the age-related changes in the gut microbiome are more or less prominent than those for other body sites and whether predictions can be made about a person’s age from a microbiome sample remain unknown. We therefore combined several large studies from different countries to determine which body site’s microbiome could most accurately predict age. We found that the skin was the best, on average yielding predictions within 4 years of chronological age. This study sets the stage for future research on the role of the microbiome in accelerating or decelerating the aging process and in the susceptibility for age-related diseases.
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“Notably, the microbiome of skin has been found to predict a person’s actual age accurately.160,163”
From Inflammation and aging: signaling pathways and intervention therapies (2023) · cites this paper as [163]
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“we repeated all bioinformatic, normalization, and ML steps using bacterial assignments from SHOGUN31 and its separate database48, which showed highly concordant performances”
From RETRACTED ARTICLE: Microbiome analyses of blood and tissues suggest cancer diagnostic approach (2020) · cites this paper as [48]
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“The ‘Web of Life’ database48 used for SHOGUN taxonomy assignments did not contain viruses, and SHOGUN processed a subset of all TCGA samples evaluated by Kraken (13,517 vs 17,625 samples).”
From RETRACTED ARTICLE: Microbiome analyses of blood and tissues suggest cancer diagnostic approach (2020) · cites this paper as [48]
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Metadata
- Authors
- Huang, S., Haiminen, N., Carrieri, A.-P., Hu, R., Jiang, L., Parida, L., Russell, B., Allaband, C., Zarrinpar, A., Vázquez-Baeza, Y., Belda-Ferre, P., Zhou, H., Kim, H.-C., Swafford, A. D., Knight, R., & Xu, Z. Z.
- Affiliations
- University of California San Diego (US)
- IBM Research - Thomas J. Watson Research Center (US)
- IBM (United Kingdom) (GB)
- Center for Microbiome Innovation, Jacobs School of Engineering, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California, USA
- Zhujiang Hospital (CN)
- IBM Research - Almaden (US)
- Nanchang University (CN)
- Corresponding author
- Knight, Rob
- Xu, Zhenjiang Zech
- ORCID
- Venue
- mSystems
- Publisher
- American Society for Microbiology
- Published
- 2020-02-11
- Volume
- 5
- Issue
- 1
- ISSN
- 2379-5077 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC7018528
- OpenAlex
- W3006148598
- Cited by
- 167
- References
- 27
- Citations by year
- 2026: 27 · 2025: 22 · 2024: 35 · 2023: 24 · 2022: 27 · 2021: 24 · 2020: 7
- FWCI
- 6.65
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- mSystems (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- eScholarship (California Digital Library) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- eScholarship (California Digital Library) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- National Institutes of Health (KL2TR000099, UL1TR001442, T32OD017863, DK120515)
- National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (R01HL148801)
- National Institute of Mental Health (R21MH117780)
- National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (R03DK114536, DK120515, K08DK102902, P30DK120515, P30DK063491)
- National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Gut microbiota and health
- Health Sciences › Dentistry › Periodontics › Oral microbiology and periodontitis research
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Aging › Genetics, Aging, and Longevity in Model Organisms
- Keywords
- chronological age estimation, skin microbiome, oral microbiota, gut microbiota, aging, age-related diseases
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