Abstract
The gut microbiota comprises the collective genomes of microbial symbionts and is composed of bacteria, fungi, viruses, and protists within the gastrointestinal tract of a host. Although the literature associated with gut microbiota is increasing, studies on eukaryotes in the human gut are just beginning to surface. Blastocystis is one of the most common intestinal parasites of humans and animals and is estimated to colonise more than 1 billion people on a global scale. However, the understanding of the genetic characteristics of Blastocystis subtype (ST) at the genome level and its relationship with other members of the gut microbiota is still limited. In this study, by surveying the prevalence and genome characteristics of Blastocystis sp. ST3 in a Chinese population (prevalence % = 6.09%), the association of Blastocystis sp. ST3 with region and time and the structure of the resident gut bacterial population was clarified. We identified novel sequences (50 mitochondrial and 41 genome sequences) and determined their genetic diversity amongst strains within Blastocystis sp. ST3 (4.14 SNPs/kb). Furthermore, we found that colonisation of Blastocystis was strongly associated with increased bacterial richness and higher abundance of several anaerobes. Finally, we performed time series sampling on two Blastocystis-positive individuals and confirmed that Blastocystis could exist continually in the human gut microbiota and persist for a long time, even for 4 years.
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Data availability
All sequencing data have been deposited in the NCBI SRA database (SRR14066491 to SRR14066400) and the public database of pathogenic microorganisms (http://data.mypathogen.org/index). The source code used in this study was released in GitHub (https://github.com/zhangwencdc/GutBlastocystis). The licence of the codes is under GPL v3 or later (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html).
Code availability
Rscripts are available on Github (https://github.com/zhangwencdc/GutBlastocystis).
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Funding
This study was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2018YFC1200100) and the Major Infectious Diseases Such as AIDS and Viral Hepatitis Prevention and Control Technology Major Projects (2018ZX10305410, 2018ZX10733402, and 2021SKLID509).
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WZ and HN designed the study and wrote the manuscript; TTZ and XHP analysed the data; YJQ and XWL performed the sampling and experimental work.
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Our analysis involved 197 faecal samples obtained from seven healthy Chinese individuals who provided written informed consent prior to enrolment in this study. Furthermore, the study was approved by the China CDC, and all experiments were performed in accordance with relevant guidelines and regulations.
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Han, N., Peng, X., Qiang, Y. et al. Genetic characteristics of Blastocystis sp. ST3 at the genome level in the Chinese population. Parasitol Res 122, 2719–2727 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00436-023-07973-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00436-023-07973-6