OH-06:

Large-scale metagenomic analysis of the Japanese gut microbiome

Human gut microbiome is composed of over 100 trillion of microbes and has profound influences on host’s physiology. Recent development of next-generation sequencers (NGS) enabled us to comprehensively explore ecological and functional features of the gut microbiomes. However, little is known about their variation and similarity among different human populations or countries. To explore the differences in their functional and evolutionary aspects, we sequenced fecal DNA samples from 106 healthy Japanese individuals by using Roche 454, Ion PGM/Proton and Illumina MiSeq and compared the data with that from over 800 individuals in other 11 countries.
The comparative analysis showed significantly high inter-country variability in the microbial composition of gut microbiomes, suggesting that the human gut microbiome is highly country-specific. Japanese gut microbiomes represented significantly high abundance of Bifidobacterium, Blautia and functions involved in carbohydrate metabolism, and a depletion of methanogenic archaea. Correlation analysis revealed a strong association of several factors such as dietary intake and antibiotic uses with gut microbiome structure. This result suggested that these factors have profoundly contributed to the variability of the modern human gut microbiomes.

keywords:Metagenomics,Gut microbiome,Next generation sequencer,Bioinformatics