| Summary: | Intro: Quantities of previous research have revealed that gut microbiota diversity alteration and gut function are highly dependent on diet. This study aimed to investigate the structure of gut microbiota in school-age children under diets differing in fat content. Methods: A total of 79 Chinese children aged 8-10 years old were recruited for this experiment. The high-fat diet was assessed using a face-to-face dietary frequency questionnaire, which measured the monthly frequency of consumption of food from ten items: meat, nuts, eggs, etc. Participants were clustered using a heatmap.2 function from gplots package in R, then divided into three groups including high-fat diet group (HF), medium-fat diet group (MF), and low-fat diet group (LF) based on the frequency of high-fat foods intake. Total bacterial DNA was extracted from each fecal sample and the V3-V4 region of 16S rDNA was sequenced by the Illumina MiSeq platform. Findings: The overall frequency of high-fat food intake per month was 62.991±22.073 in LF, 109.598±25.211 in MF, and 141.056±30.410 in HF, which was a significant difference among three groups (P<0.05). For the alpha diversity analysis, a marked decrease was detected in the microbial richness (including Sob, Chao, and Ace index) in the HF and MF compared to the LF (P<0.05). According to LEfSe analysis, Faecalibacterium and Agathobacter were enriched in LF, Clostridium innocuum group was enriched in MF, Faecalibacterium, and Agathobacter were enriched in HF (LDA score>4.0). Intake of meat was negatively correlated with Alistipes (r=-0.334, P=0.003) and Ruminococcus was negatively correlated with milk intake (r=-0.296, P=0.008) and desserts intake (r=-0.330, P=0.003). Conclusion: The structure of gut microbiota is sensitive to diet, and a decrease in fat can result in notable community richness.
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