Westlake Gut Project: A consortium of microbiome epidemiology for the gut microbiome and health research in China

Microbiome epidemiology is an emerging field for the discovery of novel disease biomarkers or intervention targets in human epidemiological studies. The determinants and consequences of human microbiome variations, especially for the gut microbiome, are both important and unsolved research questions, while the majority of findings of prior research are based on small-scale human studies with limited statistical power and a lack of replication/generalizability across different populations. Here, we initiated the Westlake Gut (WeGut) project, a consortium of gut microbiome-based human cohort studies in China. The WeGut project aims to provide a platform for the integration of gut microbiome data across different cohort studies, including two major components: 1) cohorts for healthy ageing and 2) cohorts for healthy pregnancy. The WeGut consortium includes seven core/foundation cohorts involving over 32,000 participants with gut microbiome and rich phenotype data across 17 provinces/megacities in China. Within the WeGut framework, we hope to disentangle the interplay among diet, lifestyle factors, host genetics and the gut microbiome in human health and explore the role of the gut microbiome for the precision prevention of chronic diseases in Chinese populations.