A Scale-Free, Fully Connected Global Transition Network Underlies Known Microbiome Diversity

Microbiomes are inherently linked by their structural similarity, yet the global features of such similarity are not clear. Here, we propose as a solution a search-based microbiome transition network. By traversing a composition-similarity-based network of 177,022 microbiomes, we show that although the compositions are distinct by habitat, each microbiome is on-average only seven neighbors from any other microbiome on Earth, indicating the inherent homology of microbiomes at the global scale. This network is scale-free, suggesting a high degree of stability and robustness in microbiome transition. By tracking the minimum spanning tree in this network, a global roadmap of microbiome dispersal was derived that tracks the potential paths of formulating and propagating microbiome diversity. Such search-based global microbiome networks, reconstructed within hours on just one computing node, provide a readily expanded reference for tracing the origin and evolution of existing or new microbiomes. IMPORTANCE It remains unclear whether and how compositional changes at the community to community level among microbiomes are linked to the origin and evolution of global microbiome diversity. Here we propose a microbiome transition model and a network-based analysis framework to describe and simulate the variation and dispersal of the global microbial beta-diversity across multiple habitats. The traversal of a transition network with 177,022 samples shows the inherent homology of microbiome at the global scale. Then a global roadmap of microbiome dispersal derived from the network tracks the potential paths of formulating and propagating microbiome diversity. Such search-based microbiome network provides a readily expanded reference for tracing the origin and evolution of existing or new microbiomes at the global scale.

Automated summary

By constructing a search-based microbiome transition network, it was found that microbiomes exhibit inherent homology at the global scale, and a global roadmap of microbiome dispersal was derived to track the potential paths of forming and propagating microbiome diversity.