Spatial recovery of the murine gut microbiota after antibiotics perturbation.

Abstract

Antibiotics have broad off-target effects on the gut microbiome. When the microbial community is unable to recover from antibiotics, it can lead to increased susceptibility to gastrointestinal infections and increased risk of immunological and metabolic diseases. In this study, we work to better understand how the gut microbiota recovers from antibiotics by employing a recent technology to image the entire bacterial community at once. Through this approach, we characterize the spatial changes in the gut microbiota after treatment with model antibiotics in both the cecum and colon of mice. We find antibiotic- and biogeographic-dependent spatial changes between bacterial species and that many of these spatial colocalizations do not recover to baseline levels even 35 days after antibiotic administration.