Sun Yang, Li Lianwei, Lai Aiyun, Xiao Wanmeng, Wang Kunhua, Wang Lan, Niu Junkun, Luo Juan, Chen Hongju, Dai Lin, Miao Yinglei
Department of Gastroenterology, The First Affiliated Hospital of Kunming Medical University, Yunnan Institute of Digestive Disease, Kunming, China.
Computational Biology and Medical Ecology Lab, State Key Laboratory of Genetic Resources and Evolution, Kunming Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Kunming, China.
Evol Bioinform Online. 2020 Oct 10;16:1176934320948848. doi: 10.1177/1176934320948848. eCollection 2020.
The dysbiosis of the gut microbiome associated with ulcerative colitis (UC) has been extensively studied in recent years. However, the question of whether UC influences the spatial heterogeneity of the human gut mucosal microbiome has not been addressed. Spatial heterogeneity (specifically, the inter-individual heterogeneity in microbial species abundances) is one of the most important characterizations at both population and community scales, and can be assessed and interpreted by Taylor's power law (TPL) and its community-scale extensions (TPLEs). Due to the high mobility of microbes, it is difficult to investigate their spatial heterogeneity explicitly; however, TPLE offers an effective approach to implicitly analyze the microbial communities. Here, we investigated the influence of UC on the spatial heterogeneity of the gut microbiome with intestinal mucosal microbiome samples collected from 28 UC patients and healthy controls. Specifically, we applied Type-I TPLE for measuring community spatial heterogeneity and Type-III TPLE for measuring mixed-species population heterogeneity to evaluate the heterogeneity changes of the mucosal microbiome induced by UC at both the community and species scales. We further used permutation test to determine the possible differences between UC patients and healthy controls in heterogeneity scaling parameters. Results showed that UC did not significantly influence gut mucosal microbiome heterogeneity at either the community or mixed-species levels. These findings demonstrated significant resilience of the human gut microbiome and confirmed a prediction of TPLE: that the inter-subject heterogeneity scaling parameter of the gut microbiome is an intrinsic property to humans, invariant with UC disease.
近年来，与溃疡性结肠炎（UC）相关的肠道微生物群失调已得到广泛研究。然而，UC是否会影响人类肠道黏膜微生物群的空间异质性这一问题尚未得到探讨。空间异质性（具体而言，是微生物物种丰度的个体间异质性）是种群和群落尺度上最重要的特征之一，可通过泰勒幂定律（TPL）及其群落尺度扩展（TPLEs）进行评估和解释。由于微生物的高流动性，很难直接研究它们的空间异质性；然而，TPLE提供了一种有效方法来间接分析微生物群落。在此，我们通过收集28例UC患者和健康对照的肠道黏膜微生物群样本，研究了UC对肠道微生物群空间异质性的影响。具体而言，我们应用I型TPLE来测量群落空间异质性，应用III型TPLE来测量混合物种种群异质性，以评估UC在群落和物种尺度上引起的黏膜微生物群异质性变化。我们进一步使用置换检验来确定UC患者和健康对照在异质性缩放参数上的可能差异。结果表明，UC在群落或混合物种水平上均未显著影响肠道黏膜微生物群的异质性。这些发现证明了人类肠道微生物群具有显著的恢复力，并证实了TPLE的一个预测：即肠道微生物群的个体间异质性缩放参数是人类的固有属性，不会因UC疾病而改变。
