Abstract
The human gut microbiota consists of complex microbial communities, which possibly play crucial roles in physiological functioning and health maintenance. China has evolved into a multicultural society consisting of the major ethnic group, Han, and 55 official ethnic minority groups. Nowadays, these minority groups inhabit in different Chinese provinces and some of them still keep their unique culture and lifestyle. Currently, only limited data are available on the gut microbiota of these Chinese ethnic groups. In this study, 10 major fecal bacterial groups of 314 healthy individuals from 7 Chinese ethnic origins were enumerated by quantitative polymerase chain reaction. Our data confirmed that the selected bacterial groups were common to all 7 surveyed ethnicities, but the amount of the individual bacterial groups varied to different degree. By principal component and canonical variate analyses of the 314 individuals or the 91 Han subjects, no distinct group clustering pattern was observed. Nevertheless, weak differences were noted between the Han and Zhuang from other ethnic minority groups, and between the Heilongjiang Hans from those of the other provinces. Thus, our results suggest that the ethnic origin may contribute to shaping the human gut microbiota.
Highlights
The human gut microbiota consists of complex communities of microorganisms
Relative Abundance of the Target Bacterial Groups Fecal samples were subjected to quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR)
The amount of ‘all bacteria’ detected by the universal primers used in this study revealed no significant difference between most ethnic groups except that Tibetan,Kazahk, Zhuang (p = 0.0108 and 0.0140, respectively) (Table S3)
Summary
The human gut microbiota consists of complex communities of microorganisms. The roles of such communities are being increasingly recognized, and that these intact communities together act like a ‘microbial organ’ [1,2], which may be involved in a number of physiological functions both directly and indirectly relating to digestion and metabolism, e.g. carbohydrate fermentation and absorption, energy acquisition, immunoregulation (recently reviewed by [3,4,5]). Culture techniques have been used to study the human gut microbiota composition. One obvious problem of the currently available culture techniques is the high ‘unculturability’ of the vast diversity of gut microbes, which was predicted to be 20–80% [10]. Peris-Bondia et al [14] pointed out that the three former phyla represented around 75% of the human gut microbial diversity
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