Abstract
With the improvement of living standards and dietary changes, childhood obesity has increased worldwide. This study aimed to understand the differences of intestinal flora structure between obese and normal children at school-age. Using the next generation sequencing platform, Illumina Miseq, 16S rDNA high-throughput sequencing technology, we analyzed the diversity and relative abundance of intestinal flora in 39 obese and 38 normal control school-age children. First, we categorized gut bacteria on the basis of their Operational taxonomic units (OTUs) using the RDP 16s rRNA database in RDP classifier. The alpha (α) diversity was used to measure the diversity within a sample and is calculated as a value for each sample. The beta (β) diversity was used to compare different samples and to measure the dissimilarity between each other sample. Our results indicated that intestinal flora in obese children showed lower diversity than normal controls. Significant differences of relative abundance of intestinal flora were detected at multiple levels of classifications. Identification of intestinal flora with significant difference between obese and normal children may provide important information to uncover the roles of these specific bacteria in the development of obesity and find new strategy to prevent and treat obesity through intervening the intestinal flora.
Highlights
With the improvement of living standards and dietary changes, childhood obesity has become increasingly identified worldwide, and children have been found to be affected by obesity at younger ages[1,2]
Consistent with previous studies[7,8], using real-time quantitative PCR, we demonstrated that obesity was associated with changes in intestinal Bifidobacteria (B) and Escherichia. coli (C), and a positive correlation was observed between the B/E ratio among school-age children[9]
The high-throughput sequencing techniques become available and it allows us to sequence millions of DNA molecules at the same time and provide a data pool to cover the entire microbiome in the gut. Because this sequencing method preserve the integrity of whole microbiome and calculate the amount of different species according to the number of matched sequences to a specific species, the measurement of relative abundance of the species at multiple levels using a more
Summary
With the improvement of living standards and dietary changes, childhood obesity has become increasingly identified worldwide, and children have been found to be affected by obesity at younger ages[1,2]. The high-throughput sequencing techniques become available and it allows us to sequence millions of DNA molecules at the same time and provide a data pool to cover the entire microbiome in the gut. Because this sequencing method preserve the integrity of whole microbiome and calculate the amount of different species according to the number of matched sequences to a specific species, the measurement of relative abundance of the species at multiple levels using a more www.nature.com/scientificreports/. 16S rDNA high-throughput sequencing technology to study the differences of the intestinal microbial flora in school-age children affected by obesity along with normal counterparts We used the Illumina Miseq. 16S rDNA high-throughput sequencing technology to study the differences of the intestinal microbial flora in school-age children affected by obesity along with normal counterparts
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