Abstract
BackgroundGastrointestinal microbiota, particularly gut microbiota, is associated with human health. The biodiversity of gut microbiota is affected by ethnicities and environmental factors such as dietary habits or medicine intake, and three enterotypes of the human gut microbiome were announced in 2011. These enterotypes are not significantly correlated with gender, age, or body weight but are influenced by long-term dietary habits. However, to date, only two enterotypes (predominantly consisting of Bacteroides and Prevotella) have shown these characteristics in previous research; the third enterotype remains ambiguous. Understanding the enterotypes can improve the knowledge of the relationship between microbiota and human health.ResultsWe obtained 181 human fecal samples from adults in Taiwan. Microbiota compositions were analyzed using next-generation sequencing (NGS) technology, which is a culture-independent method of constructing microbial community profiles by sequencing 16S ribosomal DNA (rDNA). In these samples, 17,675,898 sequencing reads were sequenced, and on average, 215 operational taxonomic units (OTUs) were identified for each sample. In this study, the major bacteria in the enterotypes identified from the fecal samples were Bacteroides, Prevotella, and Enterobacteriaceae, and their correlation with dietary habits was confirmed. A microbial interaction network in the gut was observed on the basis of the amount of short-chain fatty acids, pH value of the intestine, and composition of the bacterial community (enterotypes). Finally, a decision tree was derived to provide a predictive model for the three enterotypes. The accuracies of this model in training and independent testing sets were 97.2 and 84.0%, respectively.ConclusionsWe used NGS technology to characterize the microbiota and constructed a predictive model. The most significant finding was that Enterobacteriaceae, the predominant subtype, could be a new subtype of enterotypes in the Asian population.
Highlights
Gastrointestinal microbiota, gut microbiota, is associated with human health
9,133,183 sequencing reads were aligned to genes in the 16S ribosomal DNA (rDNA) database that had a sequence similarity of at least 97%; 215 operational taxonomic units (OTUs) for each sample were identified on average
Enterotype identification in the fecal samples Nine β-diversity matrices were used to identify the enterotypes in fecal samples via three clustering methods: hierarchical clustering (HC), partitioning around medoids (PAM), and k-means (Table 1)
Summary
Gastrointestinal microbiota, gut microbiota, is associated with human health. The biodiversity of gut microbiota is affected by ethnicities and environmental factors such as dietary habits or medicine intake, and three enterotypes of the human gut microbiome were announced in 2011. These enterotypes are not significantly correlated with gender, age, or body weight but are influenced by long-term dietary habits. The gut microbiome is associated with human health [2]. Enterotypes of the human gut microbiome are not associated with gender, age, or body weight but are influenced by long-term dietary habits. We aimed to identify the enterotypes of adults in Taiwan by next-generation sequencing (NGS)
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