Abstract
Human gut microbiota shows high inter-subject variations, but the actual spatial distribution and co-occurrence patterns of gut mucosa microbiota that occur within a healthy human instestinal tract remain poorly understood. In this study, we illustrated a model of this mucosa bacterial communities’ biogeography, based on the largest data set so far, obtained via 454-pyrosequencing of bacterial 16S rDNAs associated with 77 matched biopsy tissue samples taken from terminal ileum, ileocecal valve, ascending colon, transverse colon, descending colon, sigmoid colon and rectum of 11 healthy adult subjects. Borrowing from macro-ecology, we used both Taylor’s power law analysis and phylogeny-based beta-diversity metrics to uncover a highly heterogeneous distribution pattern of mucosa microbial inhabitants along the length of the intestinal tract. We then developed a spatial dispersion model with an R-squared value greater than 0.950 to map out the gut mucosa-associated flora’s non-linear spatial distribution pattern for 51.60% of the 188 most abundant gut bacterial species. Furthermore, spatial co-occurring network analysis of mucosa microbial inhabitants together with occupancy (that is habitat generalists, specialists and opportunist) analyses implies that ecological relationships (both oppositional and symbiotic) between mucosa microbial inhabitants may be important contributors to the observed spatial heterogeneity of mucosa microbiota along the human intestine and may even potentially be associated with mutual cooperation within and functional stability of the gut ecosystem.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Kunming Biological Diversity Regional Center of Large Apparatus and Equipments, Kunming Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences for their superb technical assistances as well as Andrew Willden (Kunming Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Kunming, China) for improving the language of the manuscript. This research was supported by the following grants: National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 31100916 to ZZ and Grant No. 61175071 to ZM); Natural Science Foundation of Yunnan Province of China (Grant No. 2011FA035 to PS and Grant No. 2010CD191 to JG); ‘A Hundred Talent Program’ from Chinese Academy of Sciences to PS and ZM, respectively; the three grants to ZM (that is, ‘Top Talents Program in Science and Technology’ from Yunnan Province, ‘Top Talents from Overseas’ from Yunan Province and ‘Innovative Research Initiative of the Synergy between the Natural and Computational Evolutions’ of CAS-Yunan Province). Sequences were deposited in the NCBI Sequence Read Archive (accession number SRA052611).
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ZZ, JG and PS designed the experiments. ZZ, JG, XT and HF generated the data. ZZ, JG, JX, XW, ZM and PS analysed the data. ZZ, ZM and PS wrote the manuscript with inputs from the other members of the team. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Zhang, Z., Geng, J., Tang, X. et al. Spatial heterogeneity and co-occurrence patterns of human mucosal-associated intestinal microbiota. ISME J 8, 881–893 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/ismej.2013.185
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/ismej.2013.185
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