Ras Refaat, Huynh Kevin, Desoky Enas, Badawy Ahmed, Widmer Giovanni
Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University, 200 Westboro Road, North Grafton, MA 01536, USA; Parasitology Department, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Zagazig University, Zagazig, Egypt.
Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University, 200 Westboro Road, North Grafton, MA 01536, USA.
Int J Parasitol. 2015 Jul;45(8):567-73. doi: 10.1016/j.ijpara.2015.03.005. Epub 2015 Apr 23.
Understanding the interaction between the intestinal microbiota (microbiome) and enteric pathogens is of interest in the development of alternative treatments that do not rely on chemotherapy and do not lead to drug resistance. We undertook research in a rodent model of cryptosporidiosis to assess whether the bacterial gut microbiota is impacted by infection with the protozoan pathogen Cryptosporidium parvum. The profile of the faecal bacterial microbiota in infected and uninfected animals was compared using 16S amplicon sequencing. In four independent experiments, the intestinal microbiota of infected mice differed from that of uninfected animals, regardless of the C. parvum isolate used to infect mice. The use of replicated treatment groups demonstrated that microbiota divergence between treatments was driven by the infection and did not result from spontaneous changes in the intestinal ecosystem unrelated to the infection. Microbiota perturbation induced by C. parvum appeared to be reversible, as we observed a tendency for the phylogenetic distance between infected and uninfected mice to diminish after mice cleared the infection. As mice infected with C. parvum do not develop diarrhoea, these observations indicate that microbiota perturbation results from other mechanisms than an accelerated movement of gut content.
了解肠道微生物群（微生物组）与肠道病原体之间的相互作用，对于开发不依赖化疗且不会导致耐药性的替代治疗方法具有重要意义。我们在隐孢子虫病的啮齿动物模型中开展研究，以评估原生动物病原体微小隐孢子虫感染是否会影响肠道细菌微生物群。使用16S扩增子测序比较了感染和未感染动物的粪便细菌微生物群概况。在四项独立实验中，无论用于感染小鼠的微小隐孢子虫分离株如何，感染小鼠的肠道微生物群均与未感染动物的不同。使用重复的治疗组表明，治疗之间的微生物群差异是由感染驱动的，而不是由与感染无关的肠道生态系统的自发变化导致的。微小隐孢子虫引起的微生物群扰动似乎是可逆的，因为我们观察到在小鼠清除感染后，感染和未感染小鼠之间的系统发育距离有减小的趋势。由于感染微小隐孢子虫的小鼠不会出现腹泻，这些观察结果表明，微生物群扰动是由肠道内容物加速移动以外的其他机制引起的。
