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Research Article

Chronic exposure to ampicillin alters lung microbial composition in laboratory rat

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Pages 116-130 | Received 20 Mar 2023, Accepted 25 May 2023, Published online: 15 Jun 2023
 

Abstracts

Purpose

High-throughput sequencing technologies have revealed that the lungs contain a variety of low biomass microbiota associated with various lung diseases. Rat model is an important tool to understand the possible causal relationship between pulmonary microbiota and diseases. Antibiotic exposure can alter the microbiota, however, a direct influence of long-term ampicillin exposure on commensal bacteria of healthy lungs has not been investigated, which could be useful in the study of the relation between microbiome and long-term lung diseases, especially in animal model-making of lung diseases.

Methods

The rats were aerosolized ampicillin of different concentrations for five months, and then the effect on the lung microbiota was investigated using 16S rRNA gene sequencing.

Results

The ampicillin treatment by a certain concentration (LA5, 0.2 ml of 5 mg/ml ampicillin) administration leads to profound changes in the rat lung microbiota but not in the low critical ampicillin concentration (LA01 and LA1, 0.1 and 1 mg/ml ampicillin), when compared to the untreated group (LC). The genus Acidobacteria_Gp16 dominated the ampicillin treated lung microbiota while the genera Brucella, Acinetobacter, Acidobacteria_Gp14, Sphingomonas, and Tumebacillus dominated the untreated lung microbiota. The predicted KEGG pathway analysis profile revealed some difference in the ampicillin treated group.

Conclusions

The study demonstrated the effects of different concentrations of ampicillin treatment on lung microbiota of rats in a relatively long term. It could serve as a basis for the clinical use of antibiotic and the use of ampicillin to control certain bacteria in the animal model-making of respiratory diseases such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Author contributions

P.R., Y.Z., B.L., and G.L. conceived the study, directed the project, and designed the experiments. H.J. obtained the samples. T.H. performed the microbial sequencing analysis. P.C. interpreted the results, and wrote the manuscript. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

Availability of data and material

Sequence data is available at the ENA Accession number: PRJNA862086.

Code availability

Not Applicable.

Consent to participate and for publication

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Disclosure statement

The authors report no conflict of interest.

Ethics approval

The animal care and experiments in this research were in accordance with the guiding principles for the care and use of laboratory animals recommended by the Chinese Association for Laboratory Animal Science Policy. It was approved by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee at the Guangzhou Medical University of China (Guangzhou, China; No. 2019-159).

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the NSFC-Guangdong Joint Fund Project [U1901210], Science and Technology Planning Project of Guangzhou China [202102021133], Medical Scientific Research Foundation of Guangdong Province [20201123142953643], Local Innovative and Research Teams Project of Guangdong Pearl River Talents Program [2017BT01S155].