Abstract
The traditional medicinal systems (TMS) of India (Prakriti) and Korea (Sasang) classify human individuals based on their constitution determined by the physiological and psychological traits of individuals. Similarities in the constitutions are already found between the classes of Prakriti (Vata, Pitta, and Kapha) and Sasang (TE: Taeeumin, SE: Soeumin, and SY: Soyangin) systems. Gut health is an important aspect of this constitution based classification in TMS. To determine the role of gut microbes in such classifications, we have analyzed the gut microbiome (taxa and imputed functions) in the constitutionally similar Prakriti and Sasang classes. An enrichment of Bacteroides and Prevotella enterotypes is observed in the Sasang and Prakriti samples, respectively. The impact of the constitution is found to be more prominent with respect to the taxa and predicted-functions within the Prakriti classes. Gut microbiome functional-level similarities are found to correlate well with the host phenotypes of the constitutionally similar Prakriti and Sasang classes. An enrichment of carbohydrate and amino-acid metabolism is observed in the Vata and SE classes which may be responsible for meeting with their high energy demands and lean phenotype. The Pitta and SY classes exhibit the high capacity to metabolize toxins. An enrichment of functions responsible for predisposition to obesity and high drug metabolism is observed in the Kapha and TE classes. The contribution of gut adaptive functions is found to correlate with the constitution-based classification in both Prakriti and Sasang systems. The TE class harboured the highest number of biofilm-forming and stress-tolerant microbes thus exhibiting the maximum tolerance of environmental stress. Similarities in the gut microbiota and the resulting disease predisposition patterns are found to exist between the constitutionally matching Prakriti and Sasang classes.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Almeida et al (2019) A new genomic blueprint of the human gut microbiota. Nature 568:499–504
Alves A, Bassot A, Bulteau AL, Pirola L, Morio B (2019) Glycine metabolism and its alterations in obesity and metabolic diseases. Nutrients 11:1356
Arumugam et al (2011) Enterotypes of the human gut microbiome. Nature 473:174
Bhalerao S, Deshpande T, Thatte U (2012) Prakriti (ayurvedic concept of constitution) and variations in platelet aggregation. BMC Complement Altern Med 12:1–5
Bodekar G, Graz B (2020) Traditional medicine. In: Hunter’s tropical medicine and emerging infectious diseases content repository only! pp 194–199
Breiman L (2001) Random forests. Mach Learn 45:5–32
Caporaso et al (2010) QIIME allows analysis of high-throughput community sequencing data. Nat Methods 7:335
Chae H, Lyoo IK, Lee SJ, Cho S, Bae H, Hong M, Shin M (2003) An alternative way to individualized medicine: psychological and physical traits of Sasang typology. J Altern Complement Med 9:519–528
Chae H, Lee J, Jeon ES, Kim JK (2017) Personalized acupuncture treatment with Sasang typology. Integr Med Res 6:329–336
Chaudhari et al (2019) Understanding the association between the human gut, oral and skin microbiome and the ayurvedic concept of Prakriti. J Biosci 44:112
Chauhan et al (2018) Western Indian rural gut microbial diversity in extreme Prakriti endo-phenotypes reveals signature microbes. Front Microbiol 9:118
Cho NH, Kim JY, Kim SS, Lee SK, Shin C (2014) Predicting type 2 diabetes using S asang constitutional medicine. J Diabetes Investig 5:525–532
Cole JR et al (2013) Ribosomal Database Project: data and tools for high throughput rRNA analysis. Nucleic Acids Res 42:D633–D642
Dai Z et al (2018) Multi-cohort analysis of colorectal cancer metagenome identified altered bacteria across populations and universal bacterial markers. Microbiome 6:70
DeSantis TZ et al (2006) Greengenes, a chimera-checked 16S rRNA gene database and workbench compatible with ARB. Appl Environ Microbiol 72:5069–5072
Dhakan DB et al (2019) The unique composition of Indian gut microbiome, gene catalogue, and associated fecal metabolome deciphered using multi-omics approaches. Gigascience 8:giz004
Dominguez-Bello MG, Godoy-Vitorino F, Knight R, Blaser MJ (2019) Role of the microbiome in human development. Gut 68:1108–1114
Duc Pham D, Lee JC, Lee MS, Kim JY (2012) Sasang types may differ in eating rate, meal size, and regular appetite: a systematic literature review. Asia Pac J Clin Nutr 21:327
Edgar RC (2010) Search and clustering orders of magnitude faster than BLAST. Bioinformatics 26:2460–2461
Ghodke Y, Joshi K, Patwardhan B (2011) Traditional medicine to modern pharmacogenomics: Ayurveda Prakriti type and CYP2C19 gene polymorphism associated with the metabolic variability. Evid Based Complement Altern Med 2011
Ghosal D, Ghosh S, Dutta TK, Ahn Y (2016) Current state of knowledge in microbial degradation of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs): a review. Front Microbiol 7:1369
Goodrich et al (2014) Human genetics shape the gut microbiome. Cell 159:789–799
Govindaraj et al (2015) Genome-wide analysis correlates Ayurveda Prakriti. Sci Rep 5:15786
Han YR, Lee HB, Han SY, Kim BJ, Lee SJ, Chae H (2016) Systematic review of type-specific pathophysiological symptoms of Sasang typology. Integr Med Res 5:83–98
Hou YP et al (2017) Human gut microbiota associated with obesity in Chinese children and adolescents. Biomed Res Int 2017:1–8
Jackson MA et al (2018) Gut microbiota associations with common diseases and prescription medications in a population-based cohort. Nat Commun 9:1–8
Jang E, Baek Y, Park K, Lee S (2013a) Could the Sasang constitution itself be a risk factor of abdominal obesity? BMC Complement Altern Med 13:72–76
Jang E, Baek Y, Park K, Lee S (2013b) The Sasang constitution as an independent risk factor for metabolic syndrome: propensity matching analysis. Evid Based Complement Altern Med 2013:1–6
Jang HB, Choi MK, Kang JH, Park SI, Lee HJ (2017) Association of dietary patterns with the fecal microbiota in Korean adolescents. BMC Nutr 3:20
Jing G et al (2017) Parallel-META 3: comprehensive taxonomical and functional analysis platform for efficient comparison of microbial communities. Sci Rep 7:40371
Kanehisa M, Goto S, Sato Y, Kawashima M, Furumichi M, Tanabe M (2013) Data, information, knowledge and principle: back to metabolism in KEGG. Nucleic Acids Res 42:D199–D205
Karlsson FH et al (2012) Symptomatic atherosclerosis is associated with an altered gut metagenome. Nat Commun 3:1245
Kho ZY, Lal SK (2018) The human gut microbiome–a potential controller of wellness and disease. Front Microbiol 9:1835
Kim JY, Pham DD, Koh BH (2011) Comparison of Sasang constitutional medicine, traditional Chinese medicine and Ayurveda. Evid Based Complement Altern Med 2011:1–6
Kim BY, Jin HJ, Kim JY (2012) Genome-wide association analysis of Sasang constitution in the Korean population. J Altern Complement Med 18:262–269
Kim et al (2013) Comparison of gut microbiota between Sasang constitutions. Evid Based Complement Altern Med 2013:1–9
Kim HG, Kim YJ, Ahn YC, Son CG (2015) Serum levels of stress hormones and oxidative stress biomarkers differ according to sasang constitutional type. Evid Based Complement Altern Med 2015:1–6
Kim et al (2017) Energy metabolism and whole-exome sequencing-based analysis of Sasang constitution: a pilot study. J Ayurveda Integr Med 6:165–178
Kim MJ, Lee DH, Ahn J, Ha TY, Jang YJ, Do E, Jung CH (2018) A pilot study on characteristics of metabolomics and lipidomics according to Sasang constitution. Evid Based Complement Altern Med 2018:1–12
Kim SK, Oh Y, Nam S (2019a) Research trends in Korean medicine based on temporal and network analysis. BMC Complement Altern Med 19:160
Kim et al (2019b) Metabolite markers for characterizing sasang constitution type through GC–MS and 1H NMR-based metabolomics study. Evid Based Complement Altern Med 2019:1–11
Kim et al (2020) A pilot study exploring the efficacy and safety of herbal medicine on Korean obese women with metabolic syndrome risk factors: double blinded, randomized, multicenter, placebo controlled study protocol clinical trial. Medicine 99:e18955
Kwon M, Seo SS, Kim MK, Lee DO, Lim MC (2019) Compositional and functional differences between microbiota and cervical carcinogenesis as identified by shotgun metagenomic sequencing. Cancers 11:309
Langille MG et al (2013) Predictive functional profiling of microbial communities using 16S rRNA marker gene sequences. Nat Biotechnol 31:814
Langmead B, Salzberg SL (2012) Fast gapped-read alignment with Bowtie 2. Nat Methods 9:357
Lee et al (2007) Association between genetic polymorphisms of the CYP2C19, CYP2D6 and types of Sasang constitutional medicine. Prevention 21:1
Lee SW, Jang ES, Lee J, Kim JY (2009) Current researches on the methods of diagnosing sasang constitution: an overview. Evid Based Complement Altern Med 6:43–49
Lee J, Kang W, Cho J, Cho C, Yoo H, Son C (2013) Cancer incidence varies significantly depending on Sasang constitution of traditional Korean medicine. J Tradit Chin Med 33:312–315
Lee et al (2015) Association of Sasang constitutional type with sarcopenia. Evid Based Complement Altern Med 2015:1–7
Lee S, Lee Y, Lee J (2019) A case report of sweating and palpitation due to chemotherapy for cancer in a soeumin patient with primary central nervous system lymphoma. J Sasang Const Med 31:31–40
Lee MK, Hwang M, Oh H, Kim KS (2020) Analysis of Sasang constitutional medicine as an optimal preventive care strategy for hemophilia patients. Biomed Res Int 2020:1–5
Liang Q, Lv X, Cai Q, Cai Y, Zhao B, Li G (2018) Novobiocin, a newly found TRPV1 inhibitor, attenuates the expression of TRPV1 in rat intestine and intestinal epithelial cell line IEC-6. Front Pharmacol 9:1171
Mancabelli L, Milani C, Lugli GA, Turroni F, Cocconi D, van Sinderen D, Ventura M (2017) Identification of universal gut microbial biomarkers of common human intestinal diseases by meta-analysis. FEMS Microbiol Ecol 92:fix153
Markowitz VM et al (2011) IMG: the integrated microbial genomes database and comparative analysis system. Nucleic Acids Res 40:D115–D122
McAleer JP, Kolls JK (2018) Contributions of the intestinal microbiome in lung immunity. Eur J Immunol 48:39–49
Mezouar et al (2018) Microbiome and the immune system: From a healthy steady-state to allergy associated disruption. Human Microbiome J 10:11–20
Miro-Blanch J, Yanes O (2019) Epigenetic regulation at the interplay between gut microbiota and host metabolism. Front Biol 10:638
Mobeen F, Sharma V, Tulika P (2018) Enterotype variations of the healthy human gut microbiome in different geographical regions. Bioinformation 14:560
Mobeen F, Sharma V, Prakash T (2019) Functional signature analysis of extreme Prakriti endophenotypes in gut microbiome of western Indian rural population. Bioinformation 15:490
Nam YD, Jung MJ, Roh SW, Kim MS, Bae JW (2011) Comparative analysis of Korean human gut microbiota by barcoded pyrosequencing. PLoS ONE 6:e22109
Odamaki T et al (2016) Age-related changes in gut microbiota composition from newborn to centenarian: a cross-sectional study. BMC Microbiol 16:90
Pallavi LC, Sivakumar G, Malagi K, Shastry A, Shivaprakash G, Nayak VKR (2018) A comparative study of anthropometric and body composition analysis variables in different human constitution types of Indian traditional medicine. Natl J Physiol Pharm Pharmacol 8:1041–1045
Patwardhan B, Mutalik G, Tillu G (2015) Integrative approaches for health: biomedical research, Ayurveda and yoga. Academic Press, New York
Prasher B et al (2008) Whole genome expression and biochemical correlates of extreme constitutional types defined in Ayurveda. J Transl Med 6:48
Prasher B, Gibson G, Mukerji M (2016) Genomic insights into ayurvedic and western approaches to personalized medicine. J Genet 95:209–228
Price MN, Dehal PS, Arkin AP (2010) FastTree 2—approximately maximum-likelihood trees for large alignments. PLoS ONE 5:e9490
Quast C et al (2012) The SILVA ribosomal RNA gene database project: improved data processing and web-based tools. Nucleic Acids Res 41:D590–D596
Rivera-Pinto et al (2018) Balances: a new perspective for microbiome analysis. MSystems 3:e00053-18
Rotti et al (2014) Immunophenotyping of normal individuals classified on the basis of human dosha Prakriti. J Ayurveda Integr Med 5:43
Rotti et al (2015) DNA methylation analysis of phenotype specific stratified Indian population. J Transl Med 13:151
Russell et al (2013) Major phenylpropanoid-derived metabolites in the human gut can arise from microbial fermentation of protein. Mol Nutr Food Res 57:523–535
Sharma V, Mobeen F, Prakash T (2018) Exploration of survival traits, probiotic determinants, host interactions, and functional evolution of bifidobacterial genomes using comparative genomics. Genes 9:477
Shirolkar A, Chakraborty S, Mandal T, Dabur R (2018) Plasma metabolomics reveal the correlation of metabolic pathways and Prakritis of humans. J Ayurveda Integr Med 9:113–122
Sitara AM, Chetan M, Yaligar MG (2015) A cross sectional survey to analyse the deha prakruti and the major risk factors of type 2 diabetes mellitus. Int J Res Ayurveda Pharm 6:714–719
Su X, Xu J, Ning K (2012) Meta-storms: efficient search for similar microbial communities based on a novel indexing scheme and similarity score for metagenomic data. Bioinformatics 28:2493–2501
Tandon D, Haque MM, Saravanan R, Shaikh S, Sriram P, Dubey AK, Mande SS (2018) A snapshot of gut microbiota of an adult urban population from Western region of India. PLoS ONE 13:e0195643
Tian L, Wu AK, Friedman J, Waldor MK, Weiss ST, Liu YY (2017) Deciphering functional redundancy in the human microbiome. bioRxiv: 176313
Ticinesi et al (2019) Gut microbiota, muscle mass and function in aging: a focus on physical frailty and sarcopenia. Nutrients 11:1633
Travis FT, Wallace RK (2015) Dosha brain-types: a neural model of individual differences. J Ayurveda Integr Med 6:280
Van de Wiele T, Vanhaecke L, Boeckaert C, Peru K, Headley J, Verstraete W, Siciliano S (2004) Human colon microbiota transform polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons to estrogenic metabolites. Environ Health Perspect 113:6–10
Visconti et al (2019) Interplay between the human gut microbiome and host metabolism. Nat Commun 10:1–10
Voreades N, Kozil A, Weir TL (2014) Diet and the development of the human intestinal microbiome. Front Microbiol 5:494
Ward T et al (2017) BugBase predicts organism level microbiome phenotypes. BioRxiv: 133462
Wattam AR et al (2013) PATRIC, the bacterial bioinformatics database and analysis resource. Nucleic Acids Res 42:D581–D591
Wilson ID, Nicholson JK (2017) Gut microbiome interactions with drug metabolism, efficacy, and toxicity. Transl Res 179:204–222
Won et al (2009) A genome-wide scan for the Sasang constitution in a Korean family suggests significant linkage at chromosomes 8q11. 22–23 and 11q22. 1–3. J Altern Complement Med 15:765–769
Yadav R, Kumar V, Baweja M, Shukla P (2018) Gene editing and genetic engineering approaches for advanced probiotics: a review. Crit Rev Food Sci Nutr 58:1735–1746
Yadav M, Mandeep SP (2019) Probiotics of diverse origin and their therapeutic applications: a review. J Am Coll Nutr 39:1–11
Yi et al (2019) Traditional Korean medicine-based forest therapy programs providing electrophysiological benefits for elderly individuals. Int J Environ Res Public Health 16:4325
Acknowledgements
This research was funded by DBT Ramalingaswami fellowship of TP. FM and VS acknowledge the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD), India for providing research fellowships.
Funding
This research received no external funding.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
TP and FM conceived of or designed study, TP and FM performed research, TP, FM, and VS analyzed data, TP and FM wrote the paper. All authors read and approved the paper.
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
Electronic supplementary material
Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Mobeen, F., Sharma, V. & Prakash, T. Comparative gut microbiome analysis of the Prakriti and Sasang systems reveals functional level similarities in constitutionally similar classes. 3 Biotech 10, 379 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13205-020-02376-1
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13205-020-02376-1