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Research Paper|Volume 10, Issue 12|pp 4054—4065

Association of gut microbiota composition and function with a senescence-accelerated mouse model of Alzheimer’s Disease using 16S rRNA gene and metagenomic sequencing analysis

Weijun Peng1, Pengji Yi1, Jingjing Yang2, Panpan Xu1, Yang Wang2, Zheyu Zhang1,3, Siqi Huang1, Zhe Wang1, Chunhu Zhang2
  • 1Department of Integrated Traditional Chinese & Western Medicine, The Second Xiangya Hospital, Central South University, Changsha, Hunan 410011, China
  • 2Department of Integrated Traditional Chinese & Western Medicine, Xiangya Hospital, Central South University, Changsha, Hunan 410008, China
  • 3Department of Gastroenterology, Xiangya Hospital, Central South University, Changsha, Hunan 410008, China
Received: October 21, 2018Accepted: November 28, 2018Published: December 18, 2018
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.101693

Copyright: © 2018 Peng et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

Although an intriguing potential association of the gut microbiome with Alzheimer's disease (AD) has attracted recent interest, few studies have directly assessed this relationship or underlying mechanism. Here, we compared the gut microbiota composition and functional differentiation of senescence-accelerated mouse prone 8 (SAMP8) mice with control senescence-accelerated mouse resistant 1 (SAMR1) mice using 16S rRNA gene and metagenomic sequencing analysis, respectively. Specifically, 16S sequencing results showed that the SAMP8 mice displayed a characteristic composition of the gut microbiome that clearly differed from that of the SAMR1 mice. Moreover, network analysis revealed that the gut microbiota of SAMP8 mice had decreased correlation density and clustering of operational taxonomic units. Metagenomic results revealed that the predominant Cluster of Orthologous Groups functional category related to these changes was the metabolism cluster in SAMP8 mice. The Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) annotation further demonstrated enrichment of the relative abundance of some dominant metabolism-related KEGG pathways in the SAMP8 mice, consistent with the suggested pathogenic mechanisms of AD. In conclusion, this study suggests that perturbations of the gut microbiota composition and the functional metagenome may be associated with AD. Further studies are warranted to elucidate the potential new mechanism contributing to AD progression.