Assessing causal relationship from gut microbiota to heel bone mineral density

Recent studies have demonstrated the important role played by gut microbiota in regulating bone development, but the evidence of such causal relationship is still sparse in human population. The aim of this study is to assess the causal relationship from gut microbiota to bone development and to identify specific causal bacteria taxa via a Mendelian randomization (MR) approach. A genome-wide association study (GWAS) summary statistic based two-sample MR analysis was performed. Summary statistics of microbiome GWAS (MGWAS) in 1126 twin pairs of the TwinsUK study was used as discovery sample, and the MGWAS in 984 Dutch participants from the LifeLines-DEEP cohort was used as replication sample. Estimated heel bone mineral density (eBMD) GWAS in 426,824 participants from the UK biobank (UKB) cohort was used as outcome. Bacteria were grouped into taxa features at both order and family levels. In the discovery sample, a total of 25 bacteria features including 9 orders and 16 families were analyzed. Fourteen features (5 orders + 9 families) were nominally significant, including 5 orders ( Bacteroidales, Clostridiales, Lactobacillales, Pasteurellales and Verrucomicrobiales ) and 9 families ( Bacteroidaceae, Clostridiaceae, Lachnospiraceae, Mogibacteriaceae, Pasteurellaceae, Porphyromonadaceae, Streptococcaceae, Verrucomicrobiaceae and Veillonellaceae ). One order Clostridiales and its child taxon, family Lachnospiraceae, were successfully replicated in the replication sample ( Clostridiales P discovery  = 3.32 × 10 −3 P replication  = 7.29 × 10 −3 ; Lachnospiraceae P discovery  = 0.03 P replication  = 7.29 × 10 −3 ). Our findings provided evidence of causal relationship from microbiota to bone development, as well as identified specific bacteria taxa that regulated bone mass variation, thus providing new insights into the microbiota mediated bone development mechanism.