Abstract
This study is conducted to identify the microbial architecture and its functional capacity in the Asian population via the whole metagenomics approach. A brief comparison of the Asian countries namely Malaysia, India, China, and Thailand, was conducted, giving a total of 916 taxa under observation. Results show a close representation of the taxonomic diversity in the gut microbiota of Malaysia, India, and China, where Bacteroidetes, Firmicutes, and Actinobacteria were more predominant compared to other phyla. Mainly due to the multi-racial population in Malaysia, which also consists of Malays, Indian, and Chinese, the population tend to share similar dietary preferences, culture, and lifestyle, which are major influences that shapes the structure of the gut microbiota. Moreover, Thailand showed a more distinct diversity in the gut microbiota which was highly dominated by Firmicutes. Meanwhile, functional profiles show 1034 gene families that are common between the four countries. The Malaysia samples are having the most unique gene families with a total of 67,517 gene families, and 51 unique KEGG Orthologs, mainly dominated by the metabolic pathways, followed by microbial metabolism in diverse environments. In conclusion, this study provides some general overview on the structure of the Asian gut microbiota, with some additional highlights on the Malaysian population.
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Data availability
Accession numbers: Sequences obtained in this present study have been deposited in the NCBI Sequence Read Archive (SRA) (BioProject accession number PRJNA872758).
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This work was supported by the Ministry of Higher Education Malaysia (Research Grant Ref: TRGS/1/2018/UM/01/7/2).
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Conceptualization: SBM, SB, HO, SFMT; Methodology: SFMT, SBM, SB, HO; Formal analysis and investigation: SFMT, SBM; Writing—original draft preparation: SFMT; Writing—review and editing: SFMT, SBM, SB, HO; Funding acquisition: SBM, SKPG; Resources: AR, CSR, SBM, SB; Supervision: SBM, SB, HO.
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This study was approved by the Medical Research Ethics Committee, University of Malaya Medical Center, Malaysia with ethical approval number MRECID.NO: 201914-6975, and written informed consent was obtained from all participants.
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Taha, S.F.M., Bhassu, S., Omar, H. et al. Gut microbiota of healthy Asians and their discriminative features revealed by metagenomics approach. 3 Biotech 13, 275 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13205-023-03671-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13205-023-03671-3