Information content of high-order associations of the human gut microbiota network

Year: 2021

Type: article

Abstract: The human gastrointestinal tract is an environment that hosts an ecosystem of microorganisms essential to human health. Vital biological processes emerge from fundamental inter- and intra-species molecular interactions that influence the assembly and composition of the gut microbiota ecology. Here we quantify the complexity of the ecological relationships within the human infant gut microbiota ecosystem as a function of the information contained in the nonlinear associations of a sequence of increasingly-specified maximum entropy representations of the system. Our paradigm frames the ecological state, in terms of the presence or absence of individual microbial ecological units that are identified by amplicon sequence variants (ASV) in the gut microenvironment, as a function of both the ecological states of its neighboring units and, in a departure from standard graphical model representations, the associations among the units within its neighborhood. We characterize the order of the system based on the relative quantity of statistical information encoded by high-order statistical associations of the infant gut microbiota.

Source: The Annals of Applied Statistics

DOI: 10.1214/21-aoas1449

Authors: Weston D. Viles, Juliette C. Madan, Hongzhe Li, Margaret R. Karagas, Anne G. Hoen

Institutions: Dartmouth College, University of Pennsylvania

Language: English

Topic: Gut microbiota and health

Subfield: Molecular Biology

Field: Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology

Domain: Life Sciences

Open Access status: green

Funders: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, University of Southern Maine, National Institutes of Health, National Institute of General Medical Sciences, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, U.S. National Library of Medicine

OpenAlex ID: W3025639745