Department of Epidemiology, Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research, Inhoffenstraße 7, 38124, Braunschweig, Germany.
PhD Programme "Epidemiology", Braunschweig, Germany.
BMC Microbiol. 2019 Jan 7;19(1):1. doi: 10.1186/s12866-018-1372-8.
Little is known regarding the nasal microbiome in early childhood and the impact of respiratory infection on the infants' nasal microbial composition. Here we investigated the temporal dynamics and diversity of the bacterial composition in the anterior nares in children attending daycare centers.
For our investigation, we considered 76 parental-taken nasal swabs of 26 children (aged 13 to 36 months) collected over a study period of 3 months. Overall, there was no significant age-specific effect or seasonal shift in the nasal bacterial community structure. In a sub-sample of 14 healthy children the relative abundance of individual taxa as well as the overall diversity did not reveal relevant changes, indicating a stable community structure over the entire study period. Moreover, the nasal bacterial profiles clustered subject-specific with Bray-Curtis similarities being elevated in intra-subject calculations compared to between-subject calculations. The remaining subset of 12 children provided samples taken during picornavirus infection (PVI) and either before or after a PVI. We detected an association between the relative abundance of members of the genus Streptococcus and PV when comparing both (i) samples taken during PVI with samples out of 14 healthy children and (ii) samples taken during PVI with samples taken after PVI within the same individual. In addition, the diversity was higher during PVI than after infection.
Our findings suggest that a personalized structure of the nasal bacterial community is established already in early childhood and could be detected over a timeframe of 3 months. Studies following infants over a longer time with frequent swab sampling would allow investigating whether certain parameter of the bacterial community, such as the temporal variability, could be related to viral infection.
对于幼儿期的鼻腔微生物组以及呼吸道感染对婴儿鼻腔微生物组成的影响知之甚少。在这里，我们研究了在日托中心的儿童中，鼻腔前部细菌组成的时间动态和多样性。
在我们的研究中，我们考虑了 76 个由 26 名儿童（年龄为 13 至 36 个月）的父母采集的鼻拭子，这些儿童在 3 个月的研究期间内被收集。总体而言，鼻腔细菌群落结构没有明显的年龄特异性影响或季节性变化。在 14 名健康儿童的子样本中，个体分类群的相对丰度以及整体多样性都没有显示出相关的变化，表明整个研究期间存在稳定的群落结构。此外，鼻腔细菌谱以个体为单位聚类，个体内计算的 Bray-Curtis 相似性高于个体间计算的相似性。12 名儿童的其余子集中提供了在小核糖核酸病毒感染（PVI）期间采集的样本，并且在 PVI 之前或之后采集。我们发现，在比较两种情况时，链球菌属成员的相对丰度与 PV 之间存在关联：（i）在 PVI 期间采集的样本与 14 名健康儿童中的样本相比，（ii）在 PVI 期间采集的样本与同一个体中 PVI 之后采集的样本相比。此外，多样性在 PVI 期间高于感染后。
我们的研究结果表明，鼻腔细菌群落的个体化结构在幼儿期已经建立，并可在 3 个月的时间内检测到。对婴儿进行更长时间的研究，频繁进行拭子采样，将有助于研究细菌群落的某些参数（例如时间可变性）是否与病毒感染有关。
