Metabolomics for the discovery of diet derived microbial metabolites in chronic diseases
Description: Diet is a critical contributor to the balance of human health and disease. Understanding of human dietary metabolism is important for development of nutrition based precision medicine. Some important discoveries have shown that the human gut microbiome, and their biotransformation of dietary molecules plays a dramatic effect on cardiovascular health. For example, a diet derived microbial metabolite trimethylamine-N-oxide is dose-dependently associated with cardiovascular risk. However, a comprehensive knowledge on the metabolic landscape of the human gut microbiome is lacking. This limitation prevents us from a mechanistic understanding of the role gut microbiome plays in development of cardiovascular diseases. A knowledge base of microbial gut metabolism is the missing link to explain the etiology of diet dependent cardiovascular diseases. This proposal aligns with the American Heart Association initiatives to fund foundational research projects towards “food is medicine” program. To address the existing critical knowledge gap, this proposal will 1) generate a largest knowledge base of human diet derived microbial metabolites using tandem untargeted mass-spectrometry approaches, that can readily be leveraged by a large scientific community for discoveries. We will achieve large scale annotation of microbial metabolites and biotransformation using spectral matching and feature based molecular networking; 2) use data mining techniques to search large-scale data repositories to associate diet derived microbial metabolites to phenotype including age, sex, lifestyle and cardiovascular risks; 3) Design bioinformatics pipelines to estimate dietary intake patterns from small molecules food signatures to link diet to chronic diseases. The metabolomics resources created from this proposal will significantly accelerate ongoing microbiome research, by bridging the gap between microbe and phenotype association with metabolomics data. During the fellowship tenure, I will receive valuable training in untargeted metabolomics and data science, that will prepare me for an independent research career.
Funder: American Heart Association
Amount: $159,200
Funding type: award
Start date: 2026-07-01
End date: 2028-06-30
Investigator: Harsha Gouda
Institution: The Regents of the University of California, San Diego
Funded outputs count: 1
Funder award ID: 26POST1559436
OpenAlex ID: G7947201474