Predicting neurodegenerative disease using prepathology gut microbiota composition: a longitudinal study in mice modeling Alzheimers disease pathologies

To evaluate the role of the gut microbiota-brain axis in AD, we characterized the gut microbiota of 3xTg-AD mice modeling amyloidosis and tauopathy and wild type (WT) genetic controls. Fecal samples were collected fortnightly from 4 to 52 weeks, and the V4 region of the 16S rRNA gene was amplified and sequenced on an Illumina MiSeq. We used dense longitudinal sampling to identify shifts in the gut microbiota composition, which have not been characterized before.