A universal taxonomic and functional human gut microbiome model for disease classification and phenotype discovery (opens in new tab)

The human gut microbiome is a powerful indicator of host health, yet its compositional nature, high sparsity, and inter-individual variability complicate downstream analysis. Here, we introduce two complementary approaches to characterize gut microbiome structure at population scale. First, we define eight functional signatures of the human gut microbiome using Non-negative Matrix Factorization, revealing coordinated metabolic patterns that partially decouple from taxonomic composition. Secon...