The aim of the consortium is to use markers of a normal host-microbiome interaction as an indicator for human health and/or a healthy life style. The reasons for that are (1) that gut microbiome changes are associated with several diseases and (2) that a set of markers is more likely to be indicative for a healthy state compared to a single molecule (biopattern versus biomarker). To that extent the consortium has been started to make use of 3 large human cohorts with detailed geno- and phenotyping (incl. 16sRNA microbiome analysis), one for identification of biopatterns (FoCus) and two independent cohorts for validation purpose (TOMORROW, PopGen). From a technical point of view the consortium has started to perform both, metabolomics as well as lipidomics analysis of serum samples of subjects from the FoCus cohort in order to identify bacterial metabolites in the human serum indicating a “healthy” gut-microbiome interaction as a biopattern for health.

A re- call has been started in both Canada and Germany for a subset of FoCus and Tomorrow probands in order to be able to validate the indicative biopatterns, not only in independent cohorts but also in the same individuals in a longitudinal approach. Preliminary results indicate interesting associations between nutrional data, microbiomics and metabolomics, in particular regarding bile acid metabolism.