Research Paper Volume 15, Issue 2 pp 459—471
Characterizing the gut microbiome changes with aging in a novel Alzheimer’s disease rat model
- 1 Department of Biology, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, AL 35254, USA
- 2 Department of Cell, Developmental and Integrative Biology, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, AL 35294, USA
Received: April 26, 2022 Accepted: December 22, 2022 Published: January 13, 2023
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.204484How to Cite
Copyright: © 2023 Nagarajan 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
Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is one of the most devastating diseases currently in the world with no effective treatments. There is increasing evidence that the gut microbiome plays a role in AD. Here we set out to study the age-related changes in the microbiome of the Tgf344-AD rats. We performed 16S ribosomal RNA sequencing on the fecal samples of male rats at 14 and 20 months of age. We found the Tgf344-AD rats to have decreased microbial diversity compared to controls at 14 months of age and this was found to be opposite at 20 months of age. Interestingly, we found a distinctive shift in the microbial community structure of the rats with aging along with changes in the microbiota composition. Some of the observed changes in the Tgf344AD rats were in the genera Bifidobacterium, Ruminococcus, Parasutterella, Lachnoclostridium and Butyricicoccus. Other age-related changes occuring in both the Tgf344-AD and WT control rats were decreases in Enterohaldus, Escherichia Shigella, Rothia and increase in Turicibacter and Clostrium_senso_stricto. Our study has shown that gut microbiota changes occurs in this Alzheimer’s disease rat model.
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