Meta-analysis of the microbial biomarkers in the gut–lung crosstalk in COVID-19, community-acquired pneumonia and Clostridium difficile infections

Abstract

Respiratory infections are the leading causes of mortality and the current pandemic COVID‐19 is one such trauma that imposed catastrophic devastation to the health and economy of the world. Unravelling the correlations and interplay of the human microbiota in the gut–lung axis would offer incredible solutions to the underlying mystery of the disease progression. The study compared the microbiota profiles of six samples namely healthy gut, healthy lung, COVID‐19 infected gut, COVID‐19 infected lungs, Clostridium difficile infected gut and community‐acquired pneumonia infected lungs. The metagenome data sets were processed, normalized, classified and the rarefaction curves were plotted. The microbial biomarkers for COVID‐19 infections were identified as the abundance of Candida and Escherichia in lungs with Ruminococcus in the gut. Candida and Staphylococcus could play a vital role as putative prognostic biomarkers of community‐acquired pneumonia whereas abundance of Faecalibacterium and Clostridium is associated with the C. difficile infections in gut. A machine learning random forest classifier applied to the data sets efficiently classified the biomarkers. The study offers an extensive and incredible understanding of the existence of gut–lung axis during dysbiosis of two anatomically different organs.

Diet and Nutritional Factors in the Prevention and Treatment of COVID-19: An Umbrella Review

“…50 A high-fibre diet fosters microbial production of SCFA and serotonin in the intestinal cells, which directly strengthens respiratory immune responses and membranes. 51 Though data on this topic is still very limited, the suggested relationship between a high-fibre diet and reduction of COVID-19 risk is a promising area for more clinical and interventional study.…”

Explore the changes of intestinal flora in patients with coronavirus disease 2019 based on bioinformatics

“…Given that the concerns regarding the 20% false negative rate associated with RT-PCR-based nucleic acid detection and the promising possibilities of bioinformatics analysis in the identification of biomarkers as non-invasive diagnostic tools for diagnosing COVID-19 (Ren et al, 2021;Aishwarya and Gunasekaran, 2022), on the basis of twenty patients with confirmed COVID-19 and 20 non-COVID-19 patients, we assessed the differences in gut microbiome as well as functional characteristics of bacterial taxa between the two by 16S rRNA sequencing, and further screened the key diagnostic ASVs using three machine algorithms, in order to provide a new theoretical basis for the diagnosis and prevention of COVID-19. The microbiota diversity of the control group was higher than that of the COVID-19 group.…”