Plant Based Diet, Ethnicity, and the Gut Microbiome

To characterize the human gut microbiome under highly controlled dietary intake in healthy normal weight adult participants who differ by ethnicity: White non-Hispanic and Black non-Hispanic adults. Samples will be collected to determine human genetic variation, fecal and oral microbial communities, and metabolome products. Several evolutionary and ecological diversity metrics will be distilled to test: a) if microbiome variation within each ethnicity is less than that between ethnicities; b) if microbiome variation is finely structured according to genetic relatedness; and c) if dietary variation impacts human genome x microbiome associations.