TY - Generic T1 - Diarrhea in young children from low-income countries leads to large-scale alterations in intestinal microbiota composition. Y1 - 2014 A1 - Pop, Mihai A1 - Walker, Alan W A1 - Paulson, Joseph A1 - Lindsay, Brianna A1 - Antonio, Martin A1 - Hossain, M Anowar A1 - Oundo, Joseph A1 - Tamboura, Boubou A1 - Mai, Volker A1 - Astrovskaya, Irina A1 - Corrada Bravo, Hector A1 - Rance, Richard A1 - Stares, Mark A1 - Levine, Myron M A1 - Panchalingam, Sandra A1 - Kotloff, Karen A1 - Ikumapayi, Usman N A1 - Ebruke, Chinelo A1 - Adeyemi, Mitchell A1 - Ahmed, Dilruba A1 - Ahmed, Firoz A1 - Alam, Meer Taifur A1 - Amin, Ruhul A1 - Siddiqui, Sabbir A1 - Ochieng, John B A1 - Ouma, Emmanuel A1 - Juma, Jane A1 - Mailu, Euince A1 - Omore, Richard A1 - Morris, J Glenn A1 - Breiman, Robert F A1 - Saha, Debasish A1 - Parkhill, Julian A1 - Nataro, James P A1 - Stine, O Colin KW - Bangladesh KW - Base Sequence KW - Case-Control Studies KW - Child, Preschool KW - Diarrhea, Infantile KW - Dysentery KW - Feces KW - Female KW - Gambia KW - HUMANS KW - Infant KW - Infant, Newborn KW - Intestines KW - Kenya KW - Male KW - Mali KW - Microbiota KW - Molecular Typing KW - Poverty KW - RNA, Bacterial KW - RNA, Ribosomal, 16S AB -

BACKGROUND: Diarrheal diseases continue to contribute significantly to morbidity and mortality in infants and young children in developing countries. There is an urgent need to better understand the contributions of novel, potentially uncultured, diarrheal pathogens to severe diarrheal disease, as well as distortions in normal gut microbiota composition that might facilitate severe disease.

RESULTS: We use high throughput 16S rRNA gene sequencing to compare fecal microbiota composition in children under five years of age who have been diagnosed with moderate to severe diarrhea (MSD) with the microbiota from diarrhea-free controls. Our study includes 992 children from four low-income countries in West and East Africa, and Southeast Asia. Known pathogens, as well as bacteria currently not considered as important diarrhea-causing pathogens, are positively associated with MSD, and these include Escherichia/Shigella, and Granulicatella species, and Streptococcus mitis/pneumoniae groups. In both cases and controls, there tend to be distinct negative correlations between facultative anaerobic lineages and obligate anaerobic lineages. Overall genus-level microbiota composition exhibit a shift in controls from low to high levels of Prevotella and in MSD cases from high to low levels of Escherichia/Shigella in younger versus older children; however, there was significant variation among many genera by both site and age.

CONCLUSIONS: Our findings expand the current understanding of microbiota-associated diarrhea pathogenicity in young children from developing countries. Our findings are necessarily based on correlative analyses and must be further validated through epidemiological and molecular techniques.

JA - Genome Biol VL - 15 CP - 6 M3 - 10.1186/gb-2014-15-6-r76 ER -