Mendelian Randomization Insights into Gut Microbiota Dynamics
Summary
Mendelian randomization (MR) has emerged as a robust approach to disentangle causal relationships between gut microbial features and human health outcomes. By using genetic variants associated with microbial taxa as instruments, MR overcomes many confounding and reverse-causation issues inherent to observational microbiome studies. Recent advances in large-scale genome-wide association studies (GWAS) of the gut microbiota have identified reliable genetic proxies for numerous bacterial genera and metabolic pathways, enabling two-sample MR analyses across diverse clinical endpoints. These analyses have begun to clarify the extent to which specific gut microbes and their metabolites influence cardiometabolic traits, autoimmune and neuropsychiatric disorders, cancer susceptibility and complications in pregnancy. Integration of bidirectional MR has further illuminated how disease status may perturb the microbial ecosystem, suggesting feedback loops with clinical relevance. Collectively, MR studies are refining our understanding of host–microbe interactions, highlighting potential microbial targets for risk stratification, prevention and therapeutic intervention in a range of chronic and acute conditions.
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Mendelian Randomization Insights into Gut Microbiota Dynamics publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in mendelian randomization insights into gut microbiota dynamics across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Mendelian randomization: An analytical framework using genetic variants as proxies to infer causal effects of exposures (such as microbial traits) on health outcomes.
Genome-wide association study (GWAS): A systematic scan of common genetic variants across the genome to identify associations with traits or diseases.
Instrumental variable: A genetic variant strongly associated with the exposure of interest, used to estimate causal effects free from confounding.
Horizontal pleiotropy: A phenomenon in which a genetic variant influences multiple traits through independent pathways, potentially biasing MR estimates.
Inverse-variance weighted method: A standard MR estimator that combines the ratio estimates from multiple instruments, weighted by their precision, to derive an overall causal effect.
Bacterial taxon abundance: The relative frequency or quantity of a microbial genus, family or higher‐order group within the gut ecosystem.
References
- Causal relationship between gut microbiota and cancers: a two-sample Mendelian randomisation study. BMC Medicine (2023).
- Impact of the gut microbiota and associated metabolites on cardiometabolic traits, chronic diseases and human longevity: a Mendelian randomization study. Journal of Translational Medicine (2023).
- Causal relationship between gut microbiota and myasthenia gravis: a bidirectional mendelian randomization study. Cell & Bioscience (2023).
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