Diversity of Gut Microbiota Metabolic Pathways in 10 Pairs of Chinese Infant Twins

Abstract

Early colonization of gut microbiota in human gut is a complex process. It remains unclear when gut microbiota colonization occurs and how it proceeds. In order to study gut microbiota composition in human early life, the present study recruited 10 healthy pairs of twins, including five monozygotic (MZ) and five dizygotic (DZ) twin pairs, whose age ranged from 0 to 6 years old. 20 fecal samples from these twins were processed by shotgun metagenomic sequencing, and their averaged data outputs were generated as 2G per sample. We used MEGAN5 to perform taxonomic and functional annotation of the metagenomic data, and systematically analyzed those 20 samples, including Jaccard index similarity, principle component, clustering, and correlation analyses. Our findings indicated that within our study group: 1) MZ-twins share more microbes than DZ twins or non-twin pairs, 2) gut microbiota distribution is relatively stable at metabolic pathways level, 3) age represents the strongest factor that can account for variation in gut microbiota, and 4) a clear metabolic pathway shift can be observed, which speculatively occurs around the age of 1 year old. This research will serve as a base for future studies of gut microbiota-related disease research.