H Bulygin et al., 2023, PeerJ
Enterotype classifications — such as those reported by consumer gut microbiome tests — are likely artificial labels imposed on what is actually a smooth, continuous spectrum of variation; no matter what your test says, your gut microbiome probably doesn't neatly belong to one distinct biological 'type'.
For the concept-level interpretation, see Foundations: Enterotypes.
- Limitation
- This study only addresses whether gut microbiome 'types' are real as discrete categories — it does not mean that the ratio of certain gut bacteria (like Prevotella vs Bacteroides) is useless. Those ratios may still turn out to be meaningful markers for health and diet, even if the hard boundaries between 'types' are not.
- Tags
- gut-microbiome, enterotypes, dimensionality-reduction, clustering, 16s-rrna, metagenomics, american-gut-project, human-microbiome-project