Reference data based insights expand understanding of human metabolomes

Abstract

SummaryThe human metabolome has remained largely unknown, with most studies annotating ∼10% of features. In nucleic acid sequencing, annotating transcripts by source has proven essential for understanding gene function. Here we generalize this concept to stool, plasma, urine and other human metabolomes, discovering that food-based annotations increase the interpreted fraction of molecular features 7-fold, providing a general framework for expanding the interpretability of human metabolomic “dark matter.”

Effects of a Ketogenic and Low Fat Diet on the Human Metabolome, Microbiome and Food-ome in Adults at Risk for Alzheimer’s Disease

“…In the present study, we sought to further characterize the complex relationship between diet, cognitive status, and the human microbiome and metabolome using shotgun metagenomic sequencing and untargeted metabolomics on the same samples. Furthermore, we employed a novel reference data-driven tool to empirically and retrospectively read out dietary metabolites from our samples (35). By updating our methods and integrating multiple data types, we identified key modulations to the gut microbiome and metabolome related to diet alone, cognitive status alone, or both.…”