Research Paper Volume 13, Issue 20 pp 23689—23701
Analysis of gut microbiota and metabolites in patients with rheumatoid arthritis and identification of potential biomarkers
- 1 Clinical Medical Research Center, Guangdong Provincial Engineering Research Center of Autoimmune Disease Precision Medicine, Shenzhen Engineering Research Center of Autoimmune Disease, The Second Clinical Medical College of Jinan University, The First Affiliated Hospital Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen People’s Hospital, Shenzhen 518020, Guangdong, People’s Republic of China
- 2 Department of Rheumatology and Immunology, The Second Clinical Medical College of Jinan University, The First Affiliated Hospital Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen People’s Hospital, Shenzhen 518020, Guangdong, People’s Republic of China
- 3 College of Natural Science, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78721, USA
- 4 Guangxi Key Laboratory of Metabolic Disease Research, Guilin No. 924 Hospital, Guilin 541002, Nanning, People’s Republic of China
Received: April 17, 2021 Accepted: September 29, 2021 Published: October 20, 2021
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.203641How to Cite
Copyright: © 2021 Chen 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
Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is an autoimmune disease described by joint destruction, synovitis and pannus formation. The gut microbiota acts as an environmental factor that plays an important role in RA, but little research regarding the etiopathogenic mechanisms of the microbiome in RA has been carried out. We used an integrated approach of 16S rRNA gene sequencing and ultrahigh-performance liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry-based metabolomics to analyze the structure and diversity of the intestinal flora and metabolites of the gut microbiota in RA patients compared with healthy subjects. In this study, α-diversity analysis of the gut microbiota showed that there was no significant difference between the healthy control (HC) and RA groups. However, β-diversity analysis showed that there was a significant difference between the two groups. Further analysis of alteration of the gut microbiota revealed that at the phylum level, the relative abundance of p_Bacteroidetes was significantly decreased in the RA group, while that of Verrucomicrobia and Proteobacteria was significantly increased in the RA group. At the genus level, Bacteroides, Faecalibacterium and some probiotics were decreased in the RA group, while 97 genera, including Lactobacillus, Streptococcus and Akkermansia, were increased in the RA group. Seventy-four differentially abundant metabolites were identified between the HC and RA groups, and we identified two potential biomarkers (9,12-octadecadiynoic acid and 10Z-nonadecenoic acid) in RA.