Study on the airway microecology of pulmonary tuberculosis based on 16S rRNA sequencing

Abstract Background: Pulmonary tuberculosis is a chronic infectious disease of the respiratory system. It is still one of the causes of death from a single infectious disease, but it has been stuck in the study of a single pathogen. Recent studies have shown that many diseases are related to the microbiota. We clarified the occurrence of tuberculosis and the correlation between drug resistance and respiratory flora. High-throughput 16S rRNA gene sequencing was used to characterize the respiratory microbiota composition of 30 tuberculosis (TB) patients and compared with 30 health (H) controls. According to their Gene Xpert results, 30 pulmonary tuberculosis patients were divided into 12 persons in the sensitive group (DS0) and 18 persons in the drug-resistant group (DR0). The flora of the two were compared with the H group. Results: The data generated by sequencing showed that Firmicutes, Proteus, Bacteroides, Actinomyces and Fusobacterium were the five main bacterial phyla detected, and they constituted more than 96% of the microbial community. The relative abundance of Fusobacterium, Haemophilus, Porphyromonas, Neisseria, TM7, Spirochetes, SR1, and tunica in the TB group was lower than that of the H group, and Granulicatella was higher than the H group. The PcoA diagrams of the two groups had obvious clustering differences. The Alpha diversity of the TB group is lower than that of the H group, and the Beta diversity is higher than that of the H group (P<0.05). The relative abundance of Streptococcus in the DS0 group was much higher than that in the DR0 group (P<0.005).Conclusion: Pulmonary tuberculosis can cause disorders of the respiratory tract flora, in which the relative abundance of Streptococcus was significantly different between rifampicin-sensitive and drug-resistant patients.