School of Marine Sciences, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing 210044, China.
Department of Medicine, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA.
Toxins (Basel). 2021 Feb 14;13(2):143. doi: 10.3390/toxins13020143.
Alcohol-related liver disease is one of the most prevalent types of chronic liver diseases globally. Alcohol-related liver disease begins with fatty liver, which further develops into hepatic inflammation, hepatocyte injury, and progresses to fibrosis and cirrhosis. Compositional changes of gut bacteria and fungi were found in patients with alcohol-related liver disease. However, the functional changes of fungi and correlations between fungi and bacteria have not been investigated. In this study, we first examined the functional capacity of fungi in patients with alcohol-related liver disease using shotgun metagenomics. Among 24 MetaCyc pathways contributed by fungi, superpathway of allantoin degradation in yeast was enriched in patients with alcoholic hepatitis. Furthermore, we compared the predictive power of bacteria versus fungi and found that bacteria performed better than fungi to separate patients with alcoholic hepatitis from non-alcoholic controls and patients with alcohol use disorder. Finally, we investigated the associations between the intestinal fungi and bacteria in alcoholic hepatitis patients. Positive association between fungi and bacteria was found between and , meanwhile negative association was found between and in alcoholic hepatitis patients.
酒精性肝病是全球最常见的慢性肝病类型之一。酒精性肝病始于脂肪肝，进一步发展为肝炎症、肝细胞损伤，并进展为纤维化和肝硬化。在酒精性肝病患者中发现了肠道细菌和真菌的组成变化。然而，真菌的功能变化以及真菌与细菌之间的相关性尚未得到研究。在这项研究中，我们首先使用鸟枪法宏基因组学检查了酒精性肝病患者真菌的功能能力。在真菌贡献的 24 个 MetaCyc 途径中，酵母中尿囊素降解的超级途径在酒精性肝炎患者中富集。此外，我们比较了细菌与真菌的预测能力，发现细菌比真菌更能区分酒精性肝炎患者与非酒精性对照者和酒精使用障碍患者。最后，我们研究了酒精性肝炎患者肠道真菌和细菌之间的关联。在酒精性肝炎患者中，真菌和细菌之间存在正相关，而 和 之间存在负相关。
