MicrobiomeCensus estimates human population sizes from wastewater samples based on inter-individual variability in gut microbiomes.
PLoS Comput Biol
; 18(9): e1010472, 2022 09.
Article
in English
| MEDLINE | ID: covidwho-2054247
ABSTRACT
The metagenome embedded in urban sewage is an attractive new data source to understand urban ecology and assess human health status at scales beyond a single host. Analyzing the viral fraction of wastewater in the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has shown the potential of wastewater as aggregated samples for early detection, prevalence monitoring, and variant identification of human diseases in large populations. However, using census-based population size instead of real-time population estimates can mislead the interpretation of data acquired from sewage, hindering assessment of representativeness, inference of prevalence, or comparisons of taxa across sites. Here, we show that taxon abundance and sub-species diversisty in gut-associated microbiomes are new feature space to utilize for human population estimation. Using a population-scale human gut microbiome sample of over 1,100 people, we found that taxon-abundance distributions of gut-associated multi-person microbiomes exhibited generalizable relationships with respect to human population size. Here and throughout this paper, the human population size is essentially the sample size from the wastewater sample. We present a new algorithm, MicrobiomeCensus, for estimating human population size from sewage samples. MicrobiomeCensus harnesses the inter-individual variability in human gut microbiomes and performs maximum likelihood estimation based on simultaneous deviation of multiple taxa's relative abundances from their population means. MicrobiomeCensus outperformed generic algorithms in data-driven simulation benchmarks and detected population size differences in field data. New theorems are provided to justify our approach. This research provides a mathematical framework for inferring population sizes in real time from sewage samples, paving the way for more accurate ecological and public health studies utilizing the sewage metagenome.
Full text:
Available
Collection:
International databases
Database:
MEDLINE
Main subject:
Gastrointestinal Microbiome
/
COVID-19
Type of study:
Observational study
Topics:
Variants
Limits:
Humans
Language:
English
Journal:
PLoS Comput Biol
Journal subject:
Biology
/
Medical Informatics
Year:
2022
Document Type:
Article
Affiliation country:
Journal.pcbi.1010472
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