Abstract
Objectives: Previous studies have reported that the gut microbiome has an important link with the development of hypertension. Though previous researches have focused on the links of gut bacteria with hypertension, little has been known about the linkage of gut viruses to hypertension and the development of hypertension, largely due to the lack of data mining tools for such investigation. In this work, we have analyzed 196 fecal metagenomic data related to hypertension aiming to profile the gut virome and link the gut virome to pre-hypertension and hypertension.Design: Here, we have applied a statistically sound method for mining of gut virome data and linking gut virome to hypertension. We characterized the viral composition and bacterial composition of 196 samples, identified the viral-type of each sample and linked gut virome to hypertension.Results: We stratified these 196 fecal samples into two viral-types and selected 32 viruses as the biomarkers for these groups. We found that viruses could have a superior resolution and discrimination power than bacteria for differentiation of healthy samples and pre-hypertension samples, as well as hypertension samples. Moreover, as to the co-occurrence networks linking viruses and bacteria, we found increasingly pervasive virus-bacteria linkages from healthy people to pre-hypertension people to hypertension patients.Conclusion: Overall, our results have shown ample indications of the link between human gut virome and hypertension, and could help provide microbial solutions toward early diagnoses of hypertension.
Highlights
Viruses are ubiquitous, highly abundant and diverse components of microbial communities of our bodies and natural environments (Rodriguez-Brito et al, 2010), which could shape the taxonomical and functional composition of the microbial community by altering the fitness of hosts and promoting genetic exchange (Andersson and Banfield, 2008)
Based on the systolic blood pressure (SBP) and diastolic blood pressure (DBP) information of hosts, Li et al divided these fecal samples into three groups, namely, healthy controls (Control, SBP ≤ 125 mmHg and DBP ≤ 80 mmHg for untreated subjects, 41 samples), prehypertension persons and hypertension patients (HTN, 140 mmHg ≤ SBP, or 90 mmHg ≤ DBP patients without antihypertensive treatments, 99 samples) (Li et al, 2017)
Is the alteration of gut virome associated with the development of hypertension? To address this question, we studied the viral composition of fecal samples using a cohort of 196 Chinese individuals with metagenomic data, and linked the quantitative alterations of viral compositions among healthy people, prehypertension people and hypertension patients
Summary
Highly abundant and diverse components of microbial communities of our bodies and natural environments (Rodriguez-Brito et al, 2010), which could shape the taxonomical and functional composition of the microbial community by altering the fitness of hosts and promoting genetic exchange (Andersson and Banfield, 2008). Current tools for identifying virus and provirus sequences have been developed, including Phage_Finder (Fouts, 2006), Prophinder (Lima-Mendez et al, 2008), PHASTEST (Arndt et al, 2017), PhiSpy (Akhter et al, 2012), VirSorter (Roux et al, 2015), VirFinder (Ren et al, 2017), as well as general-purpose tools such as Kraken (Wood and Salzberg, 2014) Among these tools, VirSorter, VirFinder, and Kraken are the most recent programs for identifying the viral sequences in assembled metagenomics data and these tools have significantly better rates of detecting true viral contigs (Ren et al, 2017)
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