Typing of the Gut Microbiota Community in Japanese Subjects

Gut microbiota is involved in both host health and disease and can be stratified based on bacteriological composition. However, gut microbiota clustering data are limited for Asians. In this study, fecal microbiota of 1,803 Japanese subjects, including 283 healthy individuals, were analyzed by 16S rRNA sequencing and clustered using partitioning around medoids (PAM) and the Dirichlet multinominal mixtures model, respectively. Gut microbiota community typing reproducibly identified organisms that may represent enterotypes peculiar to Japanese individuals and are partly different from those of indivuals from Western countries.