Is There a Universal Endurance Microbiota?

Area of Science:

• Microbiology
• Exercise Physiology
• Bioinformatics

Background:

• The gut microbiota influences host physiology, and its role in endurance athletes' performance is of significant interest.
• Previous studies suggest an
• Endurance microbiota
• but identified bacterial taxa vary considerably between studies.

Purpose of the Study:

• To identify consistent microbial taxa associated with endurance athletes by reanalyzing existing 16S rRNA gene sequence datasets.
• To investigate variations in gut microbiota composition, diversity, and correlations within endurance athletes compared to controls.

Main Methods:

• A standardized bioinformatics workflow was applied to four independent 16S rRNA gene sequence datasets.
• Analysis included diversity metrics, relative abundance of bacterial taxa, correlation analyses, and association network construction.
• Statistical significance and consistency across datasets were evaluated.

Main Results:

• No significant differences in alpha diversity were observed across all datasets.
• Only one dataset showed a significant overall difference in bacterial community abundance.
• No bacterial genera exhibited consistently different relative abundance across all four datasets; only Veillonella and Romboutsia showed differences in two datasets.
• No consistent changes in correlated bacterial abundances were found across datasets.
• Power analysis indicated a need for substantially larger sample sizes to detect modest differences in relative abundance.

Conclusions:

• The existence of a universally defined
• endurance microbiota
• remains elusive due to high inter-study variability.
• Comparing microbiota studies presents significant challenges, necessitating standardized methods and larger sample sizes.
• Further research with larger cohorts is required to elucidate the specific microbial signatures associated with endurance performance.