Abstract
Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is an immunologically mediated disease and may be caused by abnormal immunological response to gut microbes. Although several studies on the ecological changes associated with IBD, such as community diversities, were reported, no previous studies have investigated the changes in the spatial heterogeneity and the mechanism of community assembly of the gut microbiota associated with IBD. In the present study, we first applied the Taylor’s power law extensions to compare the community spatial heterogeneity between the gut microbial communities of the IBD patients and those of the healthy individuals. We found that the community spatial heterogeneity of gut microbiota in IBD patients is slightly lower than in the healthy individuals. This finding suggests that IBD may lower the spatial heterogeneity of gut microbiota, possibly via lowering the abundance of dominant species. We further applied the neutral theory of biodiversity to comparatively investigate the community assembly and diversity maintenance of the gut microbiota with and without IBD, and our application suggested that deterministic factors such as host immunity should be dominant forces shaping gut microbiota assembly, and diseases such as IBD may not be strong enough to change the trend set by the deterministic host factors.
Highlights
Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is a series of inflammations of colon and small intestine, consisting of two principal types, Crohn’s disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis (UC)[1,2]
The neutral theory developed by Hubbell[32], integrates neutrality, stochasticity, sampling and dispersal and formulates a null model to test the mechanism of community assembly and diversity maintenance[33,34]
Our study focuses on revealing the possible ecological changes in the human gut microbiota associated with IBD
Summary
Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is a series of inflammations of colon and small intestine, consisting of two principal types, Crohn’s disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis (UC)[1,2]. Our first objective in this study is to apply the PLEs to evaluate the influence of IBD on the community spatial heterogeneity of human gut microbiota. Another important question of both theoretical and practical significance in community ecology is that whether or not the mechanism of community assembly and diversity maintenance of gut microbiota would be changed due to IBD. We try to investigate the following two important questions that have not been addressed previously to the best of our knowledge: (i) whether or not IBD would raise (or lower) the spatial heterogeneity of gut microbiota; (ii) whether or not IBD would change the mechanism of gut microbiota assembly and diversity maintenance. Both the analyses for addressing the two questions are performed with the datasets from a comprehensive metagenomic study originally conducted by Papa et al.[40]
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