Mapping gut bacteria into functional niches reveals the ecological structure of human gut microbiomes

Microbiomes are an essential contributor to the metabolic activity in the human gastrointestinal tract. The fermentation of otherwise indigestible nutritional components like dietary fibers relies on a complex interplay of metabolic pathways that are distributed across the individual bacteria. Yet, which of the bacteria are responsible for which parts of the distributed metabolism and how they should be grouped together is insufficiently understood. Here, we present the NicheMap™, an approach to map the different bacterial taxa that make up the gut microbiome onto the different functional niches of microbial carbohydrate fermentation. Our approach uses in vitro measurements of bacterial growth and metabolic activity to identify which bacterial taxa are responsible for which metabolic function in the relevant complex context of whole human fecal microbiomes. We identified ‘characteristic taxa’ selected for by a panel growth substrates representative of dietary components that are resistant to digestion by host enzymes. These characteristic taxa offer predictions of which bacteria are stimulated by the various components of human diet. We validated these predictions using microbiome data from a human nutritional supplementation study. We suggest a template of how bacterial taxonomic diversity is organized along the trophic cascade of intestinal carbohydrate fermentation. We anticipate that our results and our approach will provide a key contribution towards building a structure-function map for gut microbiomes. Having such a map on hand is an important step in moving the microbiome from a descriptive science to an interventional one.