Gut feelings begin in childhood: how the gut metagenome links to early environment, caregiving, and behavior

Abstract

32Psychosocial environments impact normative behavioral development in children, increasing the 33 risk of problem behaviors and psychiatric disorders across the lifespan. Converging evidence 34 demonstrates early normative development is affected by the gut microbiome, which itself can be 35 altered by early psychosocial environments. Nevertheless, these relationships are poorly 36 understood in childhood, particularly beyond peri-and postnatal microbial colonization. To 37 determine the gut microbiome's role in the associations between childhood adversity and 38 behavioral development, we conducted a metagenomic investigation among cross-sectional 39 sample of early school-aged children with a range of adverse experiences and caregiver stressors 40 and relationships. Our results indicate that the taxonomic and functional composition of the gut 41 microbiome links to behavioral dysregulation during a critical period of child development. 42Furthermore, our analysis reveals that both socioeconomic risk exposure and child behaviors 43 associate with the relative abundances of specific taxa (e.g., Bacteroides and Bifidobacterium 44 species) as well as functional modules encoded in their genomes (e.g., monoamine metabolism) 45that have been linked to cognition and health. We also identified heretofore novel linkages 46 between gut microbiota, their functions, and behavior. These findings hold important 47 translational implications for developmental psychology and microbiome sciences alike, as they 48suggest that caregiver behavior might mitigate the impact of socioeconomic risk on the 49 microbiome and modify the relationship between subclinical symptoms of behavioral 50 dysregulation and the gut microbiome in early school-aged children. 51 52

Mobile Type VI secretion system loci of the gut Bacteroidales display extensive intra-ecosystem transfer, multi-species spread and geographical clustering

“…Fifteen publicly available metagenomic datasets [31,33,[48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58] were utilized in our investigations into the prevalence and distribution of various sequences of interest. Briefly, these sets collectively comprised sequencing reads from 1,767 individuals from geographically diverse regions of the world, and encompassed varying ethnic, cultural, age, gender, health, and lifestyle groups.…”