The human gut microbiota develops in concordance with its host over a lifetime which results in a community that is unique to each person. While this personalized composition is beneficial to the host, the interindividual differences in community structure make it difficult to draw generalized conclusions on how the gut microbiota will respond to food components. Often, studies on the gut microbiota require testing a single source sample from multiple donors and then performing a series of comparisons to determine any donor-independent underlaying responses. Alternatively, fecal samples from multiple donors can be combined into a single sample for testing, which streamlines the process and decreases the repetitiveness of performing the same experiments multiple times using single source fecal samples. Although combining multiple samples is advantageous, whether this strategy produces statistically comparable results to the single source method remains unclear. Here, the gut microbiota developed from single source versus combined samples were compared by harvesting feces from donors in six different age groups. The feces from these donors were then combined in equal amounts to make the combined sample. The single source and combined fecal samples were then cultured for 24 hours and the resulting community structures analyzed. The results found that the combined fecal samples produced a higher level of alpha diversity for all age groups, and, in terms of taxonomic composition, the combined fecal sample communities had lower levels of <i>Enterobacteriaceae </i>but demonstrated a high degree of similarity to the average single source communities at the class level.

Single source vs. combined fecal samples for <i>in vitro </i>gut microbiota studies

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Single source vs. combined fecal samples for in vitro gut microbiota studies