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Annual Review of Medicine

Volume 76, 2025

Normal Gut Microbiomes in Diverse Populations: Clinical Implications

  • Omprakash Shete1 and Tarini Shankar Ghosh1
  • Department of Computational Biology, Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology Delhi, New Delhi, Delhi, India; email: [email protected]
  • Vol. 76:95-114 (Volume publication date January 2025)
  • First published as a Review in Advance on November 18, 2024
  • Copyright © 2025 by the author(s).
    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See credit lines of images or other third-party material in this article for license information.

Abstract

The human microbiome is a sensor and modulator of physiology and homeostasis. Remarkable tractability underpins the promise of therapeutic manipulation of the microbiome. However, the definition of a normal or healthy microbiome has been elusive. This is in part due to the underrepresentation of minority groups and major global regions in microbiome studies to date. We review studies of the microbiome in different populations and highlight a commonality among health-associated microbiome signatures along with major drivers of variation. We also provide an overview of microbiome-associated therapeutic interventions for some widespread, widely studied diseases. We discuss sources of bias and the challenges associated with defining population-specific microbiome reference bases. We propose a roadmap for defining normal microbiome references that can be used for population-customized microbiome therapeutics and diagnostics.

Keyword(s): gut microbiome, industrialized countries, metagenome, mycobiome, non-industrialized countries, virome
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2025-01-27
2025-06-13
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/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-med-051223-031809
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Normal Gut Microbiomes in Diverse Populations: Clinical Implications
Annual Review of Medicine 76, 95 (2025); https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-med-051223-031809
/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-med-051223-031809
/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-med-051223-031809
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