Sequencing Gut Microbiota to Visualize Population Changes with Age

This is an interesting study; you'll have to actually look at the open access paper to see the meat of it, which is the various graphs showing the changes in relative population size of different microbe families in the gut that take place with age. A great deal of work on the gut microbiome and its role in health and aging is presently taking place in the scientific community; researchers have identified a number of beneficial metabolites that are produced by classes of microbe that decline with age. Further, the gut microbiome becomes ever more inflammatory with age. The size of these effects on health might be in the same ballpark as those of regular exercise, but the reasons why changes take place are not yet fully understood. The causative mechanisms seem fairly clear in and of themselves, meaning declining immune function, changes in diet, and so forth, but how they interact and which are primary and which are secondary is yet to be firmly resolved. We obtained RNA sequencing data of subjects ranging from newborns to centenarians from a previous study, and summarized the data into a relative abundance matrix of genera in all the samples. Without using the age information of samples, we applied an unsupervised algorithm to recapitulate the underlying aging progression of microbial community from hosts in different age groups and identify genera associated to this progression. Literature review of these identified genera indicated that for individuals with advanc...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs