title: Robustness of gut microbiota of healthy adults in response to probiotic intervention revealed by high-throughput pyrosequencing.
abstract: Probiotics are live microorganisms that potentially confer beneficial outcomes to host by modulating gut microbiota in the intestine. The aim of this study was to comprehensively investigate effects of probiotics on human intestinal microbiota using 454 pyrosequencing of bacterial 16S ribosomal RNA genes with an improved quantitative accuracy for evaluation of the bacterial composition. We obtained 158 faecal samples from 18 healthy adult Japanese who were subjected to intervention with 6 commercially available probiotics containing either Bifidobacterium or Lactobacillus strains. We then analysed and compared bacterial composition of the faecal samples collected before, during, and after probiotic intervention by Operational taxonomic units (OTUs) and UniFrac distances. The results showed no significant changes in the overall structure of gut microbiota in the samples with and without probiotic administration regardless of groups and types of the probiotics used. We noticed that 32 OTUs (2.7% of all analysed OTUs) assigned to the indigenous species showed a significant increase or decrease of ≥10-fold or a quantity difference in >150 reads on probiotic administration. Such OTUs were found to be individual specific and tend to be unevenly distributed in the subjects. These data, thus, suggest robustness of the gut microbiota composition in healthy adults on probiotic administration.
authors.affiliation: Center for Omics and Bioinformatics, The Department of Computational Biology, Graduate School of Frontier Sciences, The University of Tokyo, Kashiwanoha 5-1-5, Kashiwa, Chiba 277-8561, Japan.
authors.forename: Seok-Won
authors.initials: SW
authors.lastname: Kim
authors.forename: Wataru
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Suda
authors.forename: Sangwan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Kim
authors.forename: Kenshiro
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Oshima
authors.forename: Shinji
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Fukuda
authors.forename: Hiroshi
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Ohno
authors.forename: Hidetoshi
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Morita
authors.forename: Masahira
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Hattori
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D016022:Case-Control Studies; D004269:DNA, Bacterial / Q000737:chemistry; D005243:Feces / Q000382:microbiology; D005260:Female; D059014:High-Throughput Nucleotide Sequencing; D006801:Humans; D007422:Intestines / Q000382:microbiology*; D008297:Male; D054892:Metagenome / Q000187:drug effects / Q000235:genetics*; D019936:Probiotics / Q000494:pharmacology*; D012336:RNA, Ribosomal, 16S / Q000235:genetics; D017422:Sequence Analysis, DNA
chemical_list: D004269:DNA, Bacterial; D012336:RNA, Ribosomal, 16S
keywords: 16S ribosomal RNA gene; gut microbiota; probiotics; pyrosequencing