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. 2023 Oct 17;11(5):e0219423.
doi: 10.1128/spectrum.02194-23. Epub 2023 Sep 20.

Disentangling the interactions between nasopharyngeal and gut microbiome and their involvement in the modulation of COVID-19 infection

Leonardo Mancabelli  1   2 , Giuseppe Taurino  1   2 , Andrea Ticinesi  1   2   3 , Tecla Ciociola  1 , Federica Vacondio  2   4 , Christian Milani  2   5 , Federico Fontana  5 , Gabriele Andrea Lugli  5 , Chiara Tarracchini  5 , Giulia Alessandri  5 , Alice Viappiani  6 , Massimiliano Bianchi  1   2 , Antonio Nouvenne  1   2   3 , Alfredo Antonio Chetta  1   2 , Francesca Turroni  2   5 , Tiziana Meschi  1   2   3 , Marco Mor  2   4 , Ovidio Bussolati  1   2 , Marco Ventura  2   5
Affiliations

Disentangling the interactions between nasopharyngeal and gut microbiome and their involvement in the modulation of COVID-19 infection

Leonardo Mancabelli et al. Microbiol Spectr. .

Abstract

The human microbiota is reported to play a major role in the regulation of host health and immunity, suggesting a possible impact on the severity of COVID-19 disease. This preliminary study investigated the possible correlation between nasopharyngeal microbiota and COVID-19 infection. In detail, the analysis of the nasopharyngeal microbiota of hospitalized Italian patients with and without COVID-19 infection suggested a positive association of several microbial species with the severity of the disease and highlighted a sharing of several bacteria species with the respective fecal samples. Moreover, the metabolic analyses suggested a possible impact of the microbiome on the host's immune response and the disease severity.

Keywords: COVID-19; gut microbiome; inflammation; microbiome; nasopharyngeal microbiota.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Fig 1
Fig 1
Evaluation of microbial biodiversity. Panel (a) shows the nasopharyngeal samples' principal coordinate analysis (PCoA), subdivided by COVID-19 disease. Panel (b) reveals the nasopharyngeal samples' PCoA, subdivided by the cluster identified through the unsupervised Elbow and Hierarchical CLustering analysis.
Fig 2
Fig 2
Lipidomic profiles of fecal samples. Two-factor PLS-DA score plot based on all UHPLC-HRMS features (n = 2,031) on COVID-19-positive (brown) and COVID-19-negative (blue) groups.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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