Saranya Sivaraj, Julia K Copeland, Anshu Malik, Elisa Pasini, Marc Angeli, Amirhossein Azhie, Shahid Husain, Deepali Kumar, Johane Allard, David S Guttman, Atul Humar, Mamatha Bhat
Clin Transplant 2022 Feb;36(2):e14534. doi: 10.1111/ctr.14534
PMID: 34781411
Abstract
Long-term survival after Liver Transplantation (LT) is often compromised by infectious and metabolic complications. We aimed to delineate alterations in intestinal microbiome (IM) over time that could contribute to medical complications compromising long-term survival following LT. Fecal samples from LT recipients were collected at 3 months (3 M) and 6 months (6 M) post-LT. The bacterial DNA was extracted using E.Z.N.A. Stool DNA Kit and 16S rRNA gene sequencing at V4 hypervariable region was performed. DADA2 and Phyloseq was implemented to analyze the taxonomic composition. Differentially abundant taxa were identified by metagenomeSeq and LEfSe. Piphillin, an Inferred functional metagenomic analysis tool was used to study the bacterial functional content. For comparison, healthy samples were extracted from NCBI and analyzed similarly. The taxonomic & functional profiles of LT recipients were validated with metagenomic sequencing data from animals exposed to immunosuppressants using Venny. Our findings provide a new perspective on longitudinal increase in specific IM communities post-LT along with an increase in bacterial genes associated with metabolic and infectious disease.