Association between Parkinson’s disease and the faecal eukaryotic microbiota using MiSeq based 18S-amplicon sequencing. fecal eucaryotes in Parkinson's disease

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is the second most common neurodegenerative disease, and is so far not considered to be curable. PD patients suffer from several motor and non motor symptoms including gastrointestinal dysfunctions and alternations of the enteric nervous system. Constipation and difficulties with the digestion can even precede the classical motor symptoms by several years.Recently, we reported effects of PD and related medications on the faecal bacterial community of 34 German PD patients and 25 age-matched controls. Here, we used the same collective and analysed the V6 and V7 hypervariable region of PCR-amplified, eukaryotic 18S rRNA genes using an Illumina MiSeq platform.53% (18) of the PD samples and 72% (18) of the control samples yielded sufficient amplicons for downstream community analyses. Our data add knowledge to the small body of data about the eukaryotic microbiota of PD patients and suggest a potential association of certain gut eukaryotes and PD.