Research Paper Volume 9, Issue 7 pp 1698—1720

Aging and sarcopenia associate with specific interactions between gut microbes, serum biomarkers and host physiology in rats

Jay Siddharth1, *,, Anirikh Chakrabarti1, *,, Alice Pannérec1, *,, Sonia Karaz1, , Delphine Morin-Rivron1, , Mojgan Masoodi1, , Jerome N. Feige1, , Scott James Parkinson1, ,

  • 1 Nestlé Institute of Health Sciences SA, EPFL Innovation Park, Lausanne 1015, Switzerland
* Equal contribution

Received: May 5, 2017       Accepted: July 12, 2017       Published: July 17, 2017      

https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.101262
How to Cite

Copyright: Siddharth et al. This is an open‐access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

The microbiome has been demonstrated to play an integral role in the maintenance of many aspects of health that are also associated with aging. In order to identify areas of potential exploration and intervention, we simultaneously characterized age-related alterations in gut microbiome, muscle physiology and serum proteomic and lipidomic profiles in aged rats to define an integrated signature of the aging phenotype. We demonstrate that aging skews the composition of the gut microbiome, in particular by altering the Sutterella to Barneseilla ratio, and alters the metabolic potential of intestinal bacteria. Age-related changes of the gut microbiome were associated with the physiological decline of musculoskeletal function, and with molecular markers of nutrient processing/availability, and inflammatory/immune status in aged versus adult rats. Altogether, our study highlights that aging leads to a complex interplay between the microbiome and host physiology, and provides candidate microbial species to target physical and metabolic decline during aging by modulating gut microbial ecology.

Abbreviations

SCFA: Short Chain Fatty Acids, LPS: Lipopolysaccharides, PICRUSt: Phylogenetic Investigation of Communities by Reconstruction of Unobserved States, 8M: 8 month old rats, 18M: 18 month old rats, 24M: 24 month old rats, NMDS: Non-metric multidimensional scaling, OTU: Operational taxonomic unit, MFC: Metagenomic Functional Content, KO ID: KEGG Orthology ID, LPC: Lysophosphatidylcholine, LPI: Lysophosphatidylinositol, PC: Phosphatidylcholine and SE: Sterol Esters.