Abstract
As discussion of stress and stress-related disorders rapidly extends beyond the brain, gut microbiota have emerged as a promising contributor to individual differences in the risk of illness, disease course, and treatment response. Here, we employed chronic mild social defeat stress and 16S rRNA gene metagenomic sequencing to investigate the role of microbial composition in mediating anxiety- and depressive-like behavior. In socially defeated animals, we found significant reductions in the overall diversity and relative abundances of numerous bacterial genera, including Akkermansia spp., that positively correlated with behavioral metrics of both anxiety and depression. Functional analyses predicted a reduced frequency of signaling molecule pathways, including G-protein-coupled receptors, in defeated animals. Collectively, our data suggest that shifts in microbial composition may play a role in the pathogenesis of anxiety and depression.
Highlights
Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a debilitating and stigmatized public health concern
We found that exposure to a milder, seven-day iteration of chronic social defeat stress resulted in robust shifts in the structural composition of fecal microbiota
Our data suggest that many of these alterations in the relative abundances of bacteria are correlated with the severity of anxiety- and depressive-like behaviors
Summary
Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a debilitating and stigmatized public health concern. Given the high comorbidity between gastrointestinal disorders and depression, studies have revealed that patients with MDD have an altered microbial composition[4,5,6]. This finding has been recapitulated in various animal models as exposure to social stressors known to elicit anxiety- and depressive-like behavior have been shown to produce alterations in the structure of gut microbial communities[7,8,9,10,11]. Are anxiety and depression reflected in microbial composition, but evidence suggests that microbiota can influence brain function and behavior[4,12,13,14,15]. We show that shifts in the abundance of particular bacterial genera, like Akkermansia, Ruminococcus, and Dorea, resulted from exposure to this social stressor and correlated with anxiety- and depressive-like behavior
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