Mongolians core gut microbiota and its correlation with seasonal dietary changes

Abstract

Historically, the Mongol Empire ranks among the world's largest contiguous empires, and the Mongolians developed their unique lifestyle and diet over thousands of years. In this study, the intestinal microbiota of Mongolians residing in Ulan Bator, TUW province and the Khentii pasturing area were studied using 454 pyrosequencing and q-PCR technology. We explored the impacts of lifestyle and seasonal dietary changes on the Mongolians' gut microbes. At the phylum level, the Mongolians's gut populations were marked by a dominance of Bacteroidetes (55.56%) and a low Firmicutes to Bacteroidetes ratio (0.71). Analysis based on the operational taxonomic unit (OTU) level revealed that the Mongolian core intestinal microbiota comprised the genera Prevotella, Bacteroides, Faecalibacterium, Ruminococcus, Subdoligranulum and Coprococcus. Urbanisation and life-style may have modified the compositions of the gut microbiota of Mongolians from Ulan Bator, TUW and Khentii. Based on a food frequency questionnaire, we found that the dietary structure was diverse and stable throughout the year in Ulan Bator and TUW, but was simple and varied during the year in Khentii. Accordingly, seasonal effects on intestinal microbiota were more distinct in Khentii residents than in TUW or Ulan Bator residents.

Comprehensive analysis of the fecal microbiota of healthy Japanese adults reveals a new bacterial lineage associated with a phenotype characterized by a high frequency of bowel movements and a lean body type

“…Furthermore, differences were found for the abundances of only six bacterial families between only two of the seven regions (Table 2 and Additional file 1: Table S5), suggesting that area of residence does not strongly affect the composition of the fecal microbiota in the healthy adults living in Japan. Therefore, the dietary habits and daily routines that are common in the various regions of Japan today (Additional file 1: Table S9) are not sufficiently distinct as to lead to clear microbial diversity in the gut, which is in contrast to the current situation in Thailand [14] and Mongolia [10]. …”

Bacterial microbiota of Kazakhstan cheese revealed by single molecule real time (SMRT) sequencing and its comparison with Belgian, Kalmykian and Italian artisanal cheeses

“…The diversity of bacterial communities of the 40 artisanal cheeses across 4 countries was analyzed by analysis of variance (ANOVA) based on UniFrac distances as calculated by the SAS software version 9.2 (SAS Institute Inc., Cary, NC) [33]. Multivariate ANOVA (MANOVA) and clustering of microbiota of cheeses based on Mahalanobis distances [34] were conducted by the Matlab R2011b software (the MathWorks, Natick, MA, USA).…”

The avian gut microbiota: community, physiology and function in wild birds

“…Microbial gut communities of wild birds have received some attention because they can be a source of a number of human and animal diseases through direct transmission, or by acting as vectors for zoonotic pathogens (Tsiodras et al ). Migratory bird species can be vectors for long‐distance pathogen transmission and fecal pollution by wild birds has been well studied (Lu et al , Araújo et al , Ahmed et al ), but the field has focused on one or several individual pathogens and impacts on human health. The importance of the whole gut microbiota in maintaining avian health is unknown, despite widespread declines in wild bird populations (Vickery et al ).…”

“…Since then, our knowledge of wild bird microbiota has dramatically increased through new applications of high‐throughput sequencing and use of predictive metagenome function analysis. Waite and Taylor () noted that new molecular techniques have increased the number of studies focusing on diversity of gut microbiota. Identifying the microbial diversity of the host gut is a necessary first step, but provides only limited information on functional aspects of the microbial community.…”