Mucosal microbiota and metabolome along the intestinal tracts reveals location specific relationship

Abstract

BackgroundThe microbiota has been recognised as an important part for maintaining human health. Perturbation to its structure has been implicated in many diseases, such as obesity and cancers. The microbiota is highly metabolically active and fills in many niche metabolic pathways absent from the human host. Diseases such as obesity, cardiovascular disease and colorectal cancer has been linked to altered microbiota metabolism. However, there is a gap in the current knowledge on how mucosal-associated microbiota and colon mucosa interact. Here we performed an integrated analysis between the mucosal-associated microbiota and the mucosal tissue metabolites in healthy non-human primates.\n\nResultsWe found that the overall microbiota composition is influenced by both the tissue location as well as the host. We also identified bacteria signatures for different intestinal locations. The distal colon bacterial signature includes Ruminococcaceae, Bacteroidales, Christensenellaceae, Clostridiales, Sphaerochaeta, Victivallaceae, GMD14H09, CF231, ML615J-28, RF39 and R4-45B taxa. In the cecum, the signatures include Prevotella, Anaerovibrio, Roseburia, and Anaerostipes. Desulfovibrionaceae family is the only taxon that may be a signature for the duodenum. We also found an intricate global relationship between the microbiota and the host tissue metabolome that is mainly driven by the distal colon. Most importantly, we found microbial-centric tissue metabolites clusters that may have potential implications to studying host-microbiota metabolic interactions.