The human gastrointestinal (GI) tract is colonized with 10 to 100 trillion microbes, which encode 100-fold more unique genes than human genome. These microbes, known as gut microbiome, have strong association with host health and can be readily influenced by environmental factors. Moreover, it has been well established that environmental toxicants are able to induce gut microbiome perturbations and consequently affect associated functions. Nicotine exposure, mainly from cigarette smoking, is linked to a number of adverse health outcomes. Therefore, it is of significance to investigate how nicotine exposure affects gut microbiome and its metabolite profile since any alteration could potentially promote or attenuate the impact of metabolic disorders caused by nicotine exposure. In this study, we combined 16S rRNA sequencing, metagenomics sequencing, and mass spectrometry-based metabolomics to detect the alterations in the gut microbiome and its associated metabolite profile due to nicotine exposure. Interestingly, 16S rRNA sequencing result indicates that the alteration of the gut microbiome composition turns out to be dose- and gender-dependent. In addition, metagenomics sequencing identified a number of perturbed metabolic pathways that are correlated with metabolite profile changes captured by metabolomics. In conclusion, we have demonstrated that nicotine exposure can induce gut microbiome perturbation and affect related metabolic functions in C57/BL6 mice.

Effects of nicotine on the gut microbiome and its metabolic functions

252nd National Meeting (2016)

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