Although in many cases the clinical symptoms associated with gastroenteritis are acute or transient, the disease may be associated with a series of chronic sequelae, including reactive arthritis, irritable bowel syndrome and Guillain-Barre syndrome. In particular, the lasting effect of gastroenteritis on intestinal physiology is that it appears to benefit atypical microorganisms, which may lead to the destruction of the intestinal microbiome. This change in the microbiome has been shown to persist for a long time after the infection is cleared, and is associated with an increased risk of chronic sequelae.
The current standard laboratory diagnostic procedures can identify pathogens, for a large number of patients, no specific pathogen has been identified. To date, limited studies have determined the changes in the gut microbiome after the onset of gastroenteritis. The screening of the intestinal microbiome of patients with gastroenteritis not only has the potential to identify putative infectious agents in samples of unidentified pathogens, but also reveals changes in the microbiome composition associated with specific gastrointestinal pathogen infections.
The burden of acute gastroenteritis can be divided into two types, one is the acute burden that is more common in low-income countries, and the other is the chronic burden that seems to affect some gastroenteritis patients worldwide. It is well known that infection and subsequent gastroenteritis causes changes in the gut microbiome. However, few studies have examined the nature of these changes and their relationship with the development of chronic sequelae.
Recent studies have reported that the intestinal flora can promote the development of liver cancer through the liver-liver axis in animal models, and probiotics can inhibit the growth of liver cancer by regulating the intestinal flora in mice. The study found that from healthy controls to liver cirrhosis, the fecal microbial diversity decreased, but from cirrhosis to early HCC, the fecal microbial diversity increased. These results indicate that the intestinal flora has undergone significant global metastasis from cirrhosis to liver cancer, and the altered microbial community may play an important role in the occurrence and development of liver cancer. In the course of development along the colorectal adenoma-carcinoma sequence, the richness of the intestinal microbiome of colorectal cancer increases compared to adenomas.
Microbiosci can help customers with the logistics of intestinal microbiome analysis projects, including sampling and storage solutions for stool samples. Sampling and storage are key steps in the analysis of intestinal flora. During the storage process, the sampling must be standardized, and the sample should be completely stable to prevent deviations in the results.
Microbiosci has optimized and validated the extraction procedure to extract DNA (or RNA) from stool samples. DNA extraction is an essential step in the gut microbiome analysis project, because if the DNA of different organisms cannot represent the actual microbial community, the analysis is of no value. The extraction method may have a significant impact on the quantification of total bacteria and the estimation of the abundance of specific populations.
Generally, the sequencing data from the study of the gut microbial community is high-dimensional and can be used with related metadata to reveal the relationship between the gut microbial composition and/or function and environmental variables or sample characteristics.
Using multivariate analysis, Microbiosci can mine data based on the richness of different microbiomes or functional identifiers to stratify individuals in responders and non-responders, and point out whether there are significant differences in different sample groups. In addition, the analysis helps to identify the microbiome or functional identifier, which is an important driver of differences between sample groups.