An analysis of human microbe–disease associations

Abstract

The microbiota living in the human body has critical impacts on our health and disease, but a systems understanding of its relationships with disease remains limited. Here, we use a large-scale text mining-based manually curated microbe-disease association data set to construct a microbe-based human disease network and investigate the relationships between microbes and disease genes, symptoms, chemical fragments and drugs. We reveal that microbe-based disease loops are significantly coherent. Microbe-based disease connections have strong overlaps with those constructed by disease genes, symptoms, chemical fragments and drugs. Moreover, we confirm that the microbe-based disease analysis is able to predict novel connections and mechanisms for disease, microbes, genes and drugs. The presented network, methods and findings can be a resource helpful for addressing some issues in medicine, for example, the discovery of bench knowledge and bedside clinical solutions for disease mechanism understanding, diagnosis and therapy.