Abstract
The advance in microbiome and metabolome studies has generated rich omics data revealing the involvement of the microbial community in host disease pathogenesis through interactions with their host at a metabolic level. However, the computational tools to uncover these relationships are just emerging. Here, we present MiMeNet, a neural network framework for modeling microbe-metabolite relationships. Using ten iterations of 10-fold cross-validation on three paired microbiome-metabolome datasets, we show that MiMeNet more accurately predicts metabolite abundances (mean Spearman correlation coefficients increase from 0.108 to 0.309, 0.276 to 0.457, and -0.272 to 0.264) and identifies more well-predicted metabolites (increase in the number of well-predicted metabolites from 198 to 366, 104 to 143, and 4 to 29) compared to state-of-art linear models for individual metabolite predictions. Additionally, we demonstrate that MiMeNet can group microbes and metabolites with similar interaction patterns and functions to illuminate the underlying structure of the microbe-metabolite interaction network, which could potentially shed light on uncharacterized metabolites through “Guilt by Association”. Our results demonstrated that MiMeNet is a powerful tool to provide insights into the causes of metabolic dysregulation in disease, facilitating future hypothesis generation at the interface of the microbiome and metabolomics.
Highlights
The microbiome has been shown to impact both host development, normal metabolic processes, as well as the pathogenesis of various diseases [1,2,3]
Metabolic dysregulation caused by the microbiome is believed to contribute to the development of diseases such as inflammatory bowel disease, diabetes mellitus, and obesity
We present MiMeNet (Microbiome-Metabolome Network), a multi-layer perceptron neural network (MLPNN) that models the community metabolome profile using metagenomic taxonomic or functional features obtained from a microbiome sample
Summary
The microbiome has been shown to impact both host development, normal metabolic processes, as well as the pathogenesis of various diseases [1,2,3]. While previous studies have uncovered various microbe-disease associations, recent work revealed the central role of bacterial metabolites and their impact on host health [8,9,10,11,12,13]. Strong associations between microbes and metabolites were found in the gut and blood metabolomic profiles [14] and the gut of patients with IBD [15]. The identification of mechanisms of microbiome-metabolome interactions by modeling community metabolic activity is essential for understanding how the microbiome affects the host’s health and for the development of precise therapies for the prevention or management of chronic diseases [20, 21]
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