Project description:Development of the gut microbiota is greatly impacted in preterm infants. Despite increasing knowledge about microbiota composition in preterm infants, knowledge about the functional signatures of the intestinal microbiota remains limited. The aim was to study transitions in microbiota activity during the first six postnatal weeks in ten preterm infants. A total of 64 stool samples were measured by LC-MS/MS.
Project description:Development of the gut microbiota is greatly impacted in preterm infants. Despite increasing knowledge about microbiota composition in preterm infants, knowledge about the functional signatures of the intestinal microbiota remains limited. The aim was to study transitions in microbiota activity during the first six postnatal weeks in ten preterm infants. A total of 64 stool samples were measured by LC-MS/MS.
Project description:Gut microbiome research is rapidly moving towards the functional characterization of the microbiota by means of shotgun meta-omics. Here, we selected a cohort of healthy subjects from an indigenous and monitored Sardinian population to analyze their gut microbiota using both shotgun metagenomics and shotgun metaproteomics. We found a considerable divergence between genetic potential and functional activity of the human healthy gut microbiota, in spite of a quite comparable taxonomic structure revealed by the two approaches. Investigation of inter-individual variability of taxonomic features revealed Bacteroides and Akkermansia as remarkably conserved and variable in abundance within the population, respectively. Firmicutes-driven butyrogenesis (mainly due to Faecalibacterium spp.) was shown to be the functional activity with the higher expression rate and the lower inter-individual variability in the study cohort, highlighting the key importance of the biosynthesis of this microbial by-product for the gut homeostasis. The taxon-specific contribution to functional activities and metabolic tasks was also examined, giving insights into the peculiar role of several gut microbiota members in carbohydrate metabolism (including polysaccharide degradation, glycan transport, glycolysis and short-chain fatty acid production). In conclusion, our results provide useful indications regarding the main functions actively exerted by the gut microbiota members of a healthy human cohort, and support metaproteomics as a valuable approach to investigate the functional role of the gut microbiota in health and disease.
Project description:91 preterm infant gut metaproteomes measured in technical duplicate using an eleven salt pulse 2D-LC-MS/MS method. Samples represent 17 preterm infants over the first several weeks of life, of which 6 preterm infants eventually developed necrotizing enterocolitis.
Project description:Intestinal microbiota colonization is important for intestinal development and health of preterm infants, especially those with extremely low birth weight. Recent studies indicated for a dynamic crosstalk between that gut microbiota and DNA methylome of host intestinal cells. Thereby, we sought to determine the epigenomic and metagenomic consequences of suppression of microbiota colonization in the intestine of preterm neonates to gain insights into biological pathways that shape the interface between the gut microbiota and the preterm intestinal cells. We examined 14 preterm piglets by comparing the conventional preterm neonates with those ones treated with oral antibiotics for genome wide DNA methylation and 16S rDNA microbiome. Our results demonstrated an extensive genome-wide DNA methylation changes in response to the suppression of intestinal microbe colonization, especially genes involved in neonatal immune response signaling and glycol-metabolism pathways were identified. Our study highlights several key genes that might predispose preterm neonates to NEC risk due to their key roles involved in the immune-metabolic networks. Our study not only provided rich omic-data to interpret molecular program in relation with microbiota-associated methylome-proteome network changes, but also confer clinical usage of key gene markers for potential early diagnostics of NEC of preterm neonates.
Project description:The link between human gut microbiota (a complex group of microorganisms including not only bacteria but also fungi, viruses, etc.,) and the physiological state is nowadays unquestionable. Metaproteomic has emerged as a useful technique to characterize this microbial community, not just taxonomically, but also focusing on specific biological processes carried out by gut microbiota that may have an effect in the host health or pathological state. Cystic fibrosis is a genetic disease in which the microbiota of the respiratory tract determines the patient's survival and differences in composition of gut microbiota of cystic fibrosis patients respect to healthy infants have been reported. In order to characterize this host-microbiota inter-relation, we carried out the metaproteomic study of 30 stool samples from infants with cystic fibrosis.
Project description:Most hospitalized preterm infants receive antibiotics (AB) in the first days of life to treat or prevent systemic infections. Short-term, early AB treatment may also prevent against the microbiota-dependent serious gut disorder, necrotising enterocolitis (NEC). However, it remains a challenge to predict or early detection of NEC in the first weeks of life and few diagnostic markers exist. Using preterm piglets as models for infants, we hypothesised that proteomic profiling could be used to identify new early plasma biomarkers of NEC with or without prior AB treatment. Preterm newborn pigs were treated with saline (CON) or antibiotics (ampicillin, gentamicin, and metronidazole), given enterally (ENT) or parenterally (PAR), and fed formula for four days to induce NEC. The gut was collected for scoring of NEC lesions and blood was collected for haematology and plasma proteomics