Comparison of the Gut Microbe Profiles and Numbers Between Patients with Liver Cirrhosis and Healthy Individuals

Abstract

Human liver was closely associated with gut through various biological mechanisms, such as bacterium-gut interactions. Alterations of gut microbiota seemed to play an important role in induction and promotion of liver damage progression. The aim of this study was to characterize the gut microbiota in liver cirrhosis patients and assess whether there are alterations in the diversity and similarity of intestinal flora in cirrhotic patients when compared with healthy individuals. PCR-denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis (DGGE) with universal primers targeting V3 region of the 16S rRNA gene was employed to characterize the overall intestinal microbiota composition, and some excised gel bands were cloned for sequencing. Real-time PCR was further utilized to quantitatively analyze the subpopulation of microbiota using group-specific primers targeting the Enterobacteriaceae, Enterococcus and Bifidobacterium genus. The DGGE profiles of two groups demonstrated significant differences between cirrhotic and healthy groups (P < 0.05). While real-time PCR revealed significant increase of Enterobacteriaceae and Enterococcus (P < 0.05) in the cirrhotic group compared with the healthy group. The ratio of Bifidobacterium genus and Enterobacteriaceae decreased in the cirrhotic patients group, but no statistical significance. This study revealed strong relationship between alterations of gut microbiota and liver cirrhosis.

Effects of microcystin-LR on gut microflora in different gut regions of mice

“…Clustering analyses of DGGE profiles were performed with the NTSYS program version 2.10e (Exeter Software, Setauket, NY, USA) by scoring the presence or absence (1 or 0) of DGGE bands. The clustering algorithms used to calculate the dendrogram was an unweighted pair group method with arithmetic averages (UPGMA) (Liu et al, 2012).…”

“…We failed to give a definite explain with our present study. However, Liu et al (2012) found an increased diversity of microbial composition in liver cirrhosis patients, and they speculated that it might be related to bacterial overgrowth in chronic liver disease.…”

“…The intestine is divided into various well-defined anatomical regions, namely the duodenum, jejunum, ileum (belonging to the small intestine), caecum and colon (belonging to the large intestine). Meanwhile, the gut microbes are not distributed randomly throughout the intestinal tract but instead vary with intestinal topography to adapt to the environments or facilitate the functions of different gut regions (Mackie et al, 1999;Tian et al, 2011;Liu et al, 2012). The topographical metabolic variations of gut microbes have also been revealed both in vivo (Tian et al, 2011;Druart et al, 2014) and in vitro (Jiao et al, 2014a(Jiao et al, , 2014b.…”

Probiotics and Liver Disease

“…Cirrhosis patients have colonic microbiota that are different from that of healthy control subjects. 10,11 Increases in Enterobacteriaceae and Enterococcus with a reduction in Bifidobacterium species were noted in one report. Whether these changes are a cause or a consequence of cirrhosis is not clear.…”

“…Whether these changes are a cause or a consequence of cirrhosis is not clear. 10 An earlier report had indicated a reduced proportion of bacteroidetes and an increase in proteobacteria and fusobacteria. 11 In fact, a positive correlation was observed between Child-Turcotte-Pugh score and streptococcaceae.…”