Age-related variation of bacterial and fungal communities in different body habitats across the young, elderly and centenarians in Sardinia

Human body microbes co-evolve with the host during the aging process, adapting to age-related niche alternations. Previous studies have mostly focused on surveying a single body habitat to determine the age-related variation in the bacterial or fungal communities. A more comprehensive understanding of the variation of human microbiota and mycobiota across multiple body habitats related to aging is still unclear. To obtain an integrated view of the spatial distribution of microbes in a specific Mediterranean population across a wide age range, we surveyed the bacterial and fungal communities in skin, oral and gut in the young, elderly and centenarians in Sardinia using 16S rRNA and ITS1 sequencing. We found that distribution and correlation of bacterial and fungal communities in Sardinians were largely determined by body sites. In each different age group, both the bacterial and fungal communities found in the skin were significantly different in structure. In the oral habitat, age had a marginal impact on the structure of the bacterial and fungal communities. Furthermore, the gut bacterial communities in centenarians clustered separately from the young and elderly, while the fungal communities in the gut habitat could not be separated by host age.