Insects, fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals (including diverse human populations)
The advent of high-throughput sequencing has allowed researchers to characterize microbial communities at an unprecedented scale with trillions of novel sequences being generated every year. While this has led to the characterization of many gut microbiomes across the animal kingdom, few efforts have undergone to compile all the data into one dataset for scientists to analyze. This is where the Gut Microbiome Tree of Life Project comes in. To date we have compiled 17,000 gut microbiomes samples from a broad range of hosts spanning chordates to anthropods, and even annelids. Our goal is to curate a strategically designed dataset that includes an equal representation of of all animal phylogenies, diets, ecologies, and geographies, including those of human populations around the globe. See below to visualize our progress so far.
Gut microbiome composition across host phylogeny. Samples are merged by host species (n=828). Stacked barplots at tips denote the relative abundance of major bacterial phyla. The remaining phyla are represented with the gray bars for visualization purposes. The host phylogeny was made with timetree.org and is time-calibrated. Host silhouettes represent example host taxa at each particular region of the tree.