Antonio Starčević1, Janko Diminić1 and Jurica Žučko1*
1 University of Zagreb Faculty of Food Technology and Biotechnology, Zagreb, Croatia
jzucko [at] pbf.unizg.hr
Abstract
Microbiota, a complement of microorganisms living on and in us, has recently been correlated with plethora of health outcomes and health in general. To fully understand microorganisms with detrimental effects on human health it is necessary to establish a healthy “baseline” of the population. In our previous studies investigating correlation of obesity and gut microbiota composition and maintenance of microbiota equilibrium in vitro it became evident that publicly available microbiota data is lacking, especially its metadata, and it would be beneficial to create baseline microbiota composition of local population with metadata of interest. For that purpose, a pilot study of healthy working-age Croatian population was carried out. In the pilot study 60 volunteers aged between 18 and 65 years had participated providing faecal samples, for determining gut microbiota composition, and filling an online questionnaire about relevant health parameters, lifestyle, dietary habits and adherence to the Mediterranean diet. The composition of participant’s microbiota did not provide novel insights, as composition on the higher taxonomic levels was similar to existing data, but it provided on finer resolution and its linkage with collected metadata. Implementation of the project also gave important feedback about weaknesses of the study and the challenges which will be addressed in the follow-up research. Results of the study are planned to be freely available, together with all anonymized metadata.
Keywords: gut microbiota, 16S rRNA sequencing, biomarkers, metadata