A Distinct Nasal Microbiota Signature in Peritoneal Dialysis Patients.

Abstract

The nasal passages harbor both commensal and pathogenic bacteria and can be associated with infectious complications. The nasal microbiome in peritoneal dialysis (PD) patients, however, has not been well characterized. In this study, we sought to characterize the anterior nasal microbiota in peritoneal dialysis (PD) patients and assess its association with PD peritonitis. In this study, we recruited 32 PD patients, 37 kidney transplant (KTx) recipients, and 22 living donor/healthy control (HC) participants and collected their anterior nasal swabs at a single point in time. We followed the PD patients for future development of peritonitis. We performed 16S rRNA gene sequencing of the V4-V5 hypervariable region to determine the nasal microbiota. We compared nasal abundance of common genera among the 3 groups using Wilcoxon rank sum testing with Benjamini-Hochberg adjustment. DESeq2 was also utilized to compare the groups at the amplicon sequence variant levels. In the entire cohort, the most abundant genera in the nasal microbiota included: Staphylococcus, Corynebacterium, Streptococcus, and Anaerococcus. Correlational analyses revealed a significant inverse relationship between the nasal abundance of Staphylococcus and that of Corynebacterium. PD patients have a higher nasal abundance of Streptococcus than KTx recipients and HC participants. PD patients have a more diverse representation of Staphylococcus and Streptococcus than KTx recipients and HC participants. PD patients who concurrently have or who developed future Staphylococcus peritonitis had a numerically higher nasal abundance of Staphylococcus than PD patients who did not develop Staphylococcus peritonitis. We find a distinct nasal microbiota signature in PD patients compared to KTx recipients and HC participants. Given the potential relationship between the nasal pathogenic bacteria and infectious complications, further studies are needed to define the nasal microbiota associated with these infectious complications and to conduct studies on the manipulation of the nasal microbiota to prevent such complications.