Abstract
Gut microbiota is closely related to acute infectious diarrhea, one of the leading causes of mortality and morbidity in children worldwide. Understanding the dynamics of the recovery from this disease is of clinical interest. This work aims to correlate the dynamics of gut microbiota with the evolution of children who were suffering from acute infectious diarrhea caused by a rotavirus, and their recovery after the administration of a probiotic, Saccharomyces boulardii CNCM I-745. The experiment involved 10 children with acute infectious diarrhea caused by a rotavirus, and six healthy children, all aged between 3 and 4 years. The children who suffered the rotavirus infection received S. boulardii CNCM I-745 twice daily for the first 5 days of the experiment. Fecal samples were collected from each participant at 0, 3, 5, 10, and 30 days after probiotic administration. Microbial composition was characterized by 16S rRNA gene sequencing. Alpha and beta diversity were calculated, along with dynamical analysis based on Taylor's law to assess the temporal stability of the microbiota. All children infected with the rotavirus stopped having diarrhea at day 3 after the intervention. We observed low alpha diversities in the first 5 days (p-value < 0.05, Wilcoxon test), larger at 10 and 30 days after probiotic treatment. Canonical correspondence analysis (CCA) showed differences in the gut microbiota of healthy children and of those who suffered from acute diarrhea in the first days (p-value < 0.05, ADONIS test), but not in the last days of the experiment. Temporal variability was larger in children infected with the rotavirus than in healthy ones. In particular, Gammaproteobacteria class was found to be abundant in children with acute diarrhea. We identified the microbiota transition from a diseased state to a healthy one with time, whose characterization may lead to relevant clinical data. This work highlights the importance of using time series for the study of dysbiosis related to diarrhea.
Highlights
The microbiota is intimately related with the health status of the host
C5 is dominated by the unclassified genera from Enterobacteriaceae, as this is the sample with the clearest dominance of one Operational taxonomic units (OTUs) over the others, in comparison with the rest of the participants
The heterogeneity observed in the abundance profile of every individual in this study is expected because of the inherent diversity that has been proven to exist in the human gut microbiota (Lozupone et al, 2012)
Summary
The microbiota is intimately related with the health status of the host. In previous years, this complex community of microorganisms has been studied in depth, with special emphasis on the human gut microbiota because of its main role in a myriad of diseases (Moya and Ferrer, 2016). The composition of the human gut microbiota changes because of several factors, in which geography and age are of great importance (Yatsunenko et al, 2012), among other external perturbations, such as antibiotic use (Jernberg et al, 2007; Dethlefsen and Relman, 2011) and diets (David et al, 2014). Alterations in this bacterial composition influence human health through different kinds of interactions between the host and microbes (Foster et al, 2017). Intestinal communities have been demonstrated to be stable over time in healthy adults, but the behavior of the microbiota becomes noisy in perturbed conditions (Martí et al, 2017)
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