Open AccessGut Microbiota and Liver Fibrosis: One Potential Biomarker for Predicting Liver Fibrosis
Author(s) -
Zhiming Li,
Ming Ni,
Haiyang Yu,
Lili Wang,
Xiaoming Zhou,
Tao Chen,
Guangzhen Liu,
Yong Gao
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
biomed research international
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.772
H-Index - 126
eISSN - 2314-6141
pISSN - 2314-6133
DOI - 10.1155/2020/3905130
Subject(s) - fibrosis , biology , biomarker , medicine , carbon tetrachloride , liver fibrosis , gastroenterology , hepatic fibrosis , gut flora , cirrhosis , pathology , immunology , chemistry , biochemistry , organic chemistry
Purpose To investigate the relationship between gut microbiota and liver fibrosis and establish a microbiota biomarker for detecting and staging liver fibrosis.Methods 131 Wistar rats were used in our study, and liver fibrosis was induced by carbon tetrachloride. Stool samples were collected within 72 hours after the last administration. The V4 regions of 16S rRNA gene were amplified. The sequencing data was processed using the Quantitative Insights Into Microbial Ecology (QIIME version 1.9). The diversity, principal coordinate analysis (PCoA), nonmetric multidimensional scaling (NMDS), and linear discriminant analysis (LDA) effect size (LEfSe) were performed. Random-Forest classification was performed for discriminating the samples from different groups. Microbial function was assessed using the PICRUST.Results The Simpson in the control group was lower than that in the liver fibrosis group ( p = 0.048) and differed significantly among different fibrosis stages ( p = 0.047). The Chao1 index in the control group was higher than that in the liver fibrosis group ( p < 0.001). NMDS analysis showed a marked difference between the control and liver fibrosis groups ( p < 0.001). PCoA analysis indicated the different community composition between the control and liver fibrosis groups with variances of PC1 13.76% and PC2 5.89% and between different liver fibrosis stages with variances of PC1 10.51% and PC2 7.78%. LEfSe analysis showed alteration of gut microbiota in the liver fibrosis group. Biomarkers obtained from Random-Forest classification showed excellent diagnostic accuracy in prediction of liver fibrosis with AUROCs of 0.99. The AUROCs were 0.77~0.84 in prediction of stage F4. There were six increased and 17 decreased metabolic functions in the liver fibrosis group and 6 metabolic functions significantly differed among four liver fibrosis stages.Conclusion Gut microbiota is a potential biomarker for detecting and staging liver fibrosis with high diagnostic accuracies.