Imperial College London
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Professor James Seddon

Faculty of Medicine, Department of Infectious Disease

Professor of Global Child Health
 
 
 
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Contact

 

+44 (0)20 7594 3179james.seddon

 
 
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Location

 

235Norfolk PlaceSt Mary's Campus

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Summary

 

Publications

Citation

BibTex format

@article{Nel:2022:10.1186/s12866-022-02615-w,
author = {Nel, Van Zyl K and Whitelaw, A and Hesseling, A and Seddon, J and Demers, A and Newton-Foot, M},
doi = {10.1186/s12866-022-02615-w},
journal = {BMC Microbiology},
title = {Fungal diversity in the gut microbiome of young South African children},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12866-022-02615-w},
volume = {22},
year = {2022}
}
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RIS format (EndNote, RefMan)

TY  - JOUR
AB  - Background. The fungal microbiome, or mycobiome, is a poorly described component of the gut ecosystem and little is known about its structure and development in children. In South Africa, there have been no culture-independent evaluations of the child gut mycobiota. This study aimed to characterise the gut mycobiota and explore the relationships between fungi and bacteria in the gut microbiome of children from Cape Town communities. Methods. Stool samples were collected from children enrolled in the TB-CHAMP clinical trial. Internal transcribed spacer 1 (ITS1) gene sequencing was performed on a total of 115 stool samples using the Illumina MiSeq platform. Differences in fungal diversity and composition in relation to demographic, clinical, and environmental factors were investigated, and correlations between fungi and previously described bacterial populations in the same samples were described.Results. Taxa from the genera Candida and Saccharomyces were detected in all participants. Differential abundance analysis showed that Candida spp. were significantly more abundant in children younger than 2 years compared to older children. The gut mycobiota was less diverse than the bacterial microbiota of the same participants, consistent with the findings of other human microbiome studies. The variation in richness and evenness of fungi was substantial, even between individuals of the same age. There was significant association between vitamin A supplementation and higher fungal alpha diversity (p = 0.047), and girls were shown to have lower fungal alpha diversity (p = 0.003). Co-occurrence between several bacterial taxa and Candida albicans was observed.Conclusions. The dominant fungal taxa in our study population were similar to those reported in other paediatric studies; however, it remains difficult to identify the true core gut mycobiota due to the challenges set by the low abundance of gut fungi and the lack of true gut colonising species. The connection between the
AU  - Nel,Van Zyl K
AU  - Whitelaw,A
AU  - Hesseling,A
AU  - Seddon,J
AU  - Demers,A
AU  - Newton-Foot,M
DO  - 10.1186/s12866-022-02615-w
PY  - 2022///
SN  - 1471-2180
TI  - Fungal diversity in the gut microbiome of young South African children
T2  - BMC Microbiology
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12866-022-02615-w
UR  - http://hdl.handle.net/10044/1/99001
VL  - 22
ER  -
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