Faculty of Chemistry, Biotechnology and Food Sciences, Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Ås, Norway.
BMC Genomics. 2023 May 31;24(1):295. doi: 10.1186/s12864-023-09388-0.
Our knowledge about the ecological role of bacterial antimicrobial peptides (bacteriocins) in the human gut is limited, particularly in relation to their role in the diversification of the gut microbiota during early life. The aim of this paper was therefore to address associations between bacteriocins and bacterial diversity in the human gut microbiota. To investigate this, we did an extensive screening of 2564 healthy human gut metagenomes for the presence of predicted bacteriocin-encoding genes, comparing bacteriocin gene presence to strain diversity and age.
We found that the abundance of bacteriocin genes was significantly higher in infant-like metagenomes (< 2 years) compared to adult-like metagenomes (2-107 years). By comparing infant-like metagenomes with and without a given bacteriocin, we found that bacteriocin presence was associated with increased strain diversities.
Our findings indicate that bacteriocins may play a role in the strain diversification during the infant gut microbiota establishment.
我们对肠道细菌抗菌肽（细菌素）在人体肠道中的生态作用的了解有限，特别是在其在生命早期肠道微生物多样性形成中的作用方面。因此，本文旨在探讨肠道微生物群中细菌素与细菌多样性之间的关联。为了研究这一点，我们对 2564 个健康的人类肠道宏基因组进行了广泛的细菌素编码基因存在情况筛查，比较了细菌素基因的存在与菌株多样性和年龄的关系。
我们发现，与成人样宏基因组（2-107 岁）相比，婴儿样宏基因组（<2 岁）中细菌素基因的丰度明显更高。通过比较有和没有特定细菌素的婴儿样宏基因组，我们发现细菌素的存在与菌株多样性的增加有关。
我们的研究结果表明，细菌素可能在婴儿肠道微生物群建立过程中的菌株多样化中发挥作用。
