Alterations of the Human Gut Microbiome in Liver Cirrhosis

Overview

Journal Nature

Specialty Science

Date 2014 Aug 1

PMID 25079328

Citations 985

Authors

Nan Qin

Fengling Yang

Ang Li

Edi Prifti

Yanfei Chen

Li Shao

Jing Guo

Emmanuelle Le Chatelier

Jian Yao

Lingjiao Wu

Jiawei Zhou

Shujun Ni

Lin Liu

Nicolas Pons

Jean Michel Batto

Sean P Kennedy

Pierre Leonard

Chunhui Yuan

Wenchao Ding

Yuanting Chen

Xinjun Hu

Beiwen Zheng

Guirong Qian

Wei Xu

S Dusko Ehrlich

Shusen Zheng

Lanjuan Li

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Liver cirrhosis occurs as a consequence of many chronic liver diseases that are prevalent worldwide. Here we characterize the gut microbiome in liver cirrhosis by comparing 98 patients and 83 healthy control individuals. We build a reference gene set for the cohort containing 2.69 million genes, 36.1% of which are novel. Quantitative metagenomics reveals 75,245 genes that differ in abundance between the patients and healthy individuals (false discovery rate < 0.0001) and can be grouped into 66 clusters representing cognate bacterial species; 28 are enriched in patients and 38 in control individuals. Most (54%) of the patient-enriched, taxonomically assigned species are of buccal origin, suggesting an invasion of the gut from the mouth in liver cirrhosis. Biomarkers specific to liver cirrhosis at gene and function levels are revealed by a comparison with those for type 2 diabetes and inflammatory bowel disease. On the basis of only 15 biomarkers, a highly accurate patient discrimination index is created and validated on an independent cohort. Thus microbiota-targeted biomarkers may be a powerful tool for diagnosis of different diseases.

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