Abstract
Previous studies revealed that there existed great individual variations of gut microbiota in mice, and the gut bacteria of mice were changed with the occurrence and development of diseases. To identify the core gut bacteria in healthy mice and explore their relationships with the host phenotypes would help to understand the underlying mechanisms. In this study, we identified 37 genus-level core bacteria from feces of 101 healthy mice with different ages, sexes, and mouse strains in three previous studies. They collectively represented nearly half of the total sequences, and predominantly included carbohydrate- and amino acids-metabolizing bacteria and immunomodulatory bacteria. Among them, Anaerostipes indwelt the gut of all healthy mice. Co-abundance analysis showed that these core genera were clustered into five groups (Group C1-C5), which were ecologically related. For example, the abundances of Group C2 including probiotics Bifidobacterium and Lactobacillus slightly positively correlated with those of Group C1. Principal component analysis (PCA) and multivariate analysis of variance test revealed that these core gut genera were distinguished with age and sex, and also associated with their health/disease state. Linear discriminant analysis effect size (LEfSe) method showed that bacteria in Group C1 and C2/C3 increased with the age in infancy and early adulthood, and were more abundant in female mice than in male ones. The metabolic syndrome (MS) induced by high fat diet (HFD) and accelerated postnatal growth would decrease Group C2 genera, whereas probiotics intervention would reverse HFD-induced reduction of Group C2. Spearman correlation analysis indicated that the principal components based on the abundance of the 37 core genera were significantly correlated with host characteristic parameters of MS. These results demonstrated that the 37 core genera in five co-abundance groups from healthy mice were related to host phenotypes. It was indicated that these prevalent gut bacterial genera could be representative of the healthy gut microbiome in gnotobiotic animal models, and might also be candidates of probiotics and fecal microbiota transplantation.