ArticleNature communications2025
Longitudinal gut microbiota tracking reveals the dynamics of horizontal gene transfer.
Article in Nature communications, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
What it found
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The trial behind it
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed.
- Synthetic microbial communities: emerging live biotherapeutics for targeted gut microbiome modulation.Gut microbes · 2026Review
- LGTM: Gaussian process modulated neural topic modeling for longitudinal microbiome.Gut microbes · 2026Article
- Gene Exchange Mechanisms in Natural and Engineered Probiotics Within the Human Gut Implications for Antibiotic Resistance and Metabolic Modulation.Probiotics and antimicrobial proteins · 2026Review
- Profiling the gut resistome to unlock antimicrobial resistance biology and inform clinical risk.Nature communications · 2026Review
- Antibiotic-Driven Gut Microbiome Dysbiosis: Resistome Dynamics, Metabolic Disruption, and Paths to Restoration.Antibiotics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Perturbations shift the composition of bacterial DNA carried by virus-like particles in the murine gut microbiome.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Article
- Low-Abundance and FragmentaryBiomolecules · 2026Article
- Review
- Microbiome-Driven Risk Stratification and Biotherapeutics in Radiation Enteritis.Computational and structural biotechnology journal · 2026Review
- Longitudinal gut microbiota tracking reveals the dynamics of horizontal gene transfer.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Digital health technology empowering China's community full life cycle health management.Digital healthReview
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
9 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) is a major driver of bacterial evolution, but its role in shaping the human gut microbiome over time remains poorly understood. Here, we present a longitudinal metagenomic analysis of 676 fecal samples from 338 individuals in the Lifelines-DEEP study collected ~4 years apart, using a newly developed workflow to detect recent HGT events from metagenome-assembled genomes. We identified 5,644 high-confidence HGT events occurring within the past ~10,000 years across 116 gut bacterial species. We find that species pairs with an HGT relationship were significantly more likely to maintain stable co-abundance relationships over the 4-year period, suggesting that gene exchange contributes to community stability. Notably, HGT and strain replacement act together to disseminate mobile genes in the population. Furthermore, our observation that an individual's mobile gene pool remains highly personalized and stable over time indicates that host lifestyles drive specific gene transfer. For example, proton pump inhibitor usage is linked to increased transfer of multidrug transporter genes. Our findings demonstrate, at the individual gut microbiome level, that HGT is both an integral and stabilizing force in the human gut ecosystem and an important mechanism for disseminating adaptive functions, underscoring HGT potential for tracking host lifestyle.
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