Changes in gut microbial community upon chronic kidney disease

by Wu Liu, Jiaqi Huang, Tong Liu, Yutian Hu, Kaifeng Shi, Yi Zhou, Ning Zhang

With the increasing incidence and mortality of chronic kidney disease (CKD), targeted therapies for CKD have been explored constantly. The important role of gut microbiota on CKD has been emphasized increasingly, it is necessary to analyze the metabolic mechanism of CKD patients from the perspective of gut microbiota. In this study, bioinformatics was used to analyze the changes of gut microbiota between CKD and healthy control (HC) groups using 315 samples from NCBI database. Diversity analysis showed significant changes in evenness compared to the HC group. PCoA analysis revealed significant differences between the two groups at phylum level. In addition, the F/B ratio was higher in CKD group than in HC group, suggesting the disorder of gut microbiota, imbalance of energy absorption and the occurrence of metabolic syndrome in CKD group. The study found that compared with HC group, the abundance of bacteria associated with impaired kidney was increased in CKD group, such as Ralstonia and Porphyromonas, which were negatively associated with eGFR. PICRUSt2 was used to predict related functions and found that different pathways between the two groups were mainly related to metabolism, involving the metabolism of exogenous and endogenous substances, as well as Glycerophospholipid metabolism, which provided evidence for exploring the relationship between gut microbiota and lipid metabolism. Therefore, in subsequent studies, special attention should be paid to these bacteria and metabolic pathway, and animal experiments and metabolomics studies should be conducted explore the association between bacterial community and CKD, as well as the therapeutic effects of these microbial populations on CKD.