16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing of fecal microbiota in elderly patients with glucose or lipid metabolic abnormalities
This project aims to profile the gut microbial community structure in elderly individuals (aged >= 60 years) with abnormal glucose metabolism (including impaired fasting glucose and type 2 diabetes) or abnormal lipid metabolism (including hyperlipidemia and dyslipidemia). Fecal samples were collected from 111 participants, who were divided into three groups based on their fasting blood glucose (FBG) trajectories or baseline levels: group FBG_U, group FBG_S, and group FBG_D.Total genomic DNA was extracted from stool specimens using the QIAamp PowerFecal Pro DNA Kit. The V3-V4 hypervariable region of the bacterial 16S rRNA gene was amplified using the forward primer 343F (TACGGRAGGCAGCAG) and the reverse primer 798R (AGGGTATCTAATCCT). Raw sequencing data were processed using the QIIME2 pipeline. Briefly, reads were demultiplexed, quality-filtered, denoised, and merged into amplicon sequence variants (ASVs). Taxonomic assignment was conducted against the SILVA database (version 138). Downstream analyses, including alpha diversity (Shannon, Chao1), beta diversity (Bray-Curtis dissimilarity), and linear discriminant analysis effect size (LEfSe), will be applied to identify differential microbial signatures among the three metabolic subgroups.This study will provide insights into the association between gut dysbiosis and metabolic disorders in the aging population, potentially identifying novel microbiome-based biomarkers for early risk stratification. All raw sequence data have been deposited in the NCBI Sequence Read Archive (SRA) under this BioProject.