Obesity is known to be a major public health issue affecting more than 1.9 billion adults, meaning that 39% of adults are considered obese and overweight. Increasing evidence suggests that compromised microbiota is inducing dysbiosis and is essential for healthy host physiology and a promoter of human disease. The microbiota is fundamentally dynamic, beginning with successive infant colonization and indicating daily variability in the healthy adult due to environmental as well as other factors. Microbiota manipulation therapy is currently an area of intense research as a potential treatment not just for obesity but also for infectious, autoimmune, and other diseases.
In this study, a fecal sample of a healthy woman was used as a source for the inoculation of the nutrient medium in in vitro system. Four consecutive cultivations were conducted in the bioreactor, two control cultivations, and two cultivations impacted with probiotic and prebiotic treatment and the gut microbiota change was monitored by 16s rDNA sequencing on the 12h basis during 72 hours.
The results of sequencing implied that there is a positive impact of the treatment on the gut microbiota and it can successfully be manipulated with probiotics and prebiotics. The dynamics of an observed shift were further predicted by generalized Lotka-Volterra modeling (gLVM).
Longitudinal microbiota insight obtained from a single patient revealed rapid and extensive changes in microbial composition when manipulated with external factors and emphasized the need for predictive models that would capture the dynamics of complex, nonlinear, and constantly changing gut microbiome communities.