Abstract
The study of the burden that parasites can exert upon the bacterial gut microbiota was restricted by the available technologies and their costs. Currently, next-generation sequencing coupled with traditional methodologies allows the study of eukaryotic parasites (protozoa and helminths) and its effects on the human bacterial gut microbiota diversity. This diversity can be altered by a variety of factors such as age, diet, genetics and parasitic infections among others. The disturbances of the gut microbiota have been associated with a variety of illnesses. Children population in developing countries, are especially susceptible to parasitic infections because of the lack of proper sanitation and undernutrition, allowing both, the thriving of intestinal parasites and profound alteration of the gut microbiota. In this work, we have sampled the stool of 23 children from four different children’s care-centers in Medellin, Colombia, and we have identified the eukaryotic parasites by traditional and molecular methodologies coupled with microbial profiling using 16S rDNA sequencing. This mixed methodology approach has allowed us to establish an interesting relationship between Giardia intestinalis and helminth infection, having both effects upon the bacterial gut microbiota enterotypes, causing a switch from a type I to a type II enterotype upon infection.
Highlights
The community of hundreds of bacteria species inhabiting the human gastrointestinal tract, plays a paramount role in human health
Some of them had non-parasitic protozoa; (iii) Giardia: the samples of children infected with Giardia intestinalis and (iv) Helm-Pro: mixed samples of children infected by Ascaris lumbricoides, some of them with either Trichuris trichiura or Enterobius vermicularis and most of them with accompanying non-parasitic protozoa or Giardia sp
This is a striking result for two reasons: (i) changing enterotypes in humans is not easy to achieve (Wu et al, 2011; Yin et al, 2017), for instance, a study of 10 subjects who were subjected to a dietary change from high-fat/low-fiber to low-fat/high-fiber, did modulated the bacterial gut microbiota (BGM) but they did not change the enterotype (Wu et al, 2011; Roager et al, 2014); and (ii) since the enterotypes are associated with long-term dietary habits, and these are somewhat different between industrialized countries and developing ones (De Filippo et al, 2010), it would be reasonable to assume that populations from the same region with similar diet, would have the same enterotypes (Yatsunenko et al, 2012)
Summary
The community of hundreds of bacteria species (trillions of individual bacteria) inhabiting the human gastrointestinal tract, plays a paramount role in human health. These microorganisms referred collectively as the gut microbiota (GM) have evolved in association with themselves and with us for millions of years. It is estimated that there are –at least–400 different species of bacteria in the human gastrointestinal tract (Eckburg et al, 2005; Huttenhower et al, 2012). The relative abundance of each one of them might vary between individuals and populations (Blaser & Falkow, 2009; Huttenhower et al, 2012; Bär et al, 2015)
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