Function‐centered back‐tracing refines obesity‐associated gut microbiome signals beyond abundance‐based profiling

By integrating taxonomic and functional profiling of 1543 adult gut metagenomes, this study identified microbial taxa and enzymatic functions associated with increasing Body Mass Index. Function-centered taxonomic back-tracing of branched-chain amino acid transaminase, nucleotide diphosphatase, and phosphatidylserine decarboxylase revealed only limited overlap between candidate functional carriers and taxa identified as obesity-associated by conventional abundance-based profiling. Most carriers of the individual functions were not detected as positively associated with obesity, highlighting the value of combining taxonomic, functional, and strain-level analyses to interpret obesity-related gut microbiome variation.