The representative microbiome: social determinants and tools for population research

描述(由申请人提供)：以人体为宿主的大量微生物群落(“微生物群”)的结构和功能正在成为健康结果变化的新贡献者。随着人类微生物组与健康之间的联系的出现，人口健康方法了解微生物组变异的社会和环境决定因素将是微生物学和临床研究的重要补充。大规模并行测序和计算的进步现在使得在以人口为基础的研究中能够相对低成本地表征人类微生物群。人类微生物组项目和MetaHIT项目描述了一小群健康志愿者中的人类微生物组，但这两个项目都没有使用具有广泛表型变异的具有代表性的基于人群的样本，而且社会经济和人口因素与微生物组组成的关联在很大程度上是未知的。人类口腔是人体内最多样化的微生物群落之一，它与口腔和全身疾病有关，包括糖尿病、心血管疾病和早产。这项研究将在2009-2012年全国健康和营养检查调查(NHANES)中具有全国代表性的大样本中建立口腔微生物组特征的流行率以及这些特征与社会人口因素的关系。我们将进一步研究口腔微生物组与健康风险生物标记物的关联，这些生物标记物因SES和种族/民族而异，包括炎症(C-反应蛋白)、糖尿病和糖尿病前期(空腹血糖和HbA1C%)。最后，该项目还将为这一新兴领域的跨学科研究建立基础设施，方法是开发一个公共 为人口健康研究人员提供基于网络的界面和工具包，以便轻松地将微生物组数据纳入其分析。了解口腔微生物组的社会和生命过程决定因素有可能导致基于环境修改和微生物生态操作的新的预防战略，以减少健康差距。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The structure and function of the vast array of microbial communities hosted by the human body ("microbiome") is emerging as a novel contributor to variation in health outcomes. As links between the human microbiome and health emerge, population health approaches to understanding the social and environmental determinants of microbiome variation will be an important complement to microbiological and clinical research. Advances in massively parallel sequencing and computing now enable relatively low-cost characterization of the human microbiome in population-based studies. The Human Microbiome Project and MetaHIT project characterized the human microbiome among small groups of healthy volunteers, but neither of these projects used a representative population-based sample with a wide range of phenotypic variation, and the association of socioeconomic and demographic factors with microbiome composition is largely unknown. The human mouth harbors one of the most diverse microbial communities in the human body, which has been linked with both oral and systemic disease including diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and pre-term birth. This study will establish the prevalence of oral microbiome characteristics and the associations of these characteristics with sociodemographic factors in a large, nationally representative sample from the 2009-2012 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). We will further examine the association of the oral microbiome with biomarkers of health risk that vary by SES and race/ethnicity including inflammation (C-reactive protein) and diabetes and pre-diabetes (fasting blood glucose and HbA1C%). Finally, the project will also build infrastructure for inter-disciplinary research in this emerging area by developing a publicly available, web- based interface and toolkit for population health researchers to easily incorporate microbiome data into their analysis. Understanding the social and life course determinants of the oral microbiome has the potential to lead to novel prevention strategies based upon environmental modification and manipulation of microbial ecology to reduce health disparities.