In silico analysis of intestinal microbial instability and symptomatic markers in mice during the acute phase of severe burns

Background Severe burns may alter the stability of the intestinal flora and affect the patient’s recovery process.

Understanding the characteristics of the gut microbiota in the acute phase of burns and their association with phenotype can help to accurately assess the progression of the disease and identify potential microbiota markers.

Methods We established mouse models of partial thickness deep III degree burns and collected faecal samples for 16 S rRNA amplification and high throughput sequencing at two time points in the acute phase for independent bioinformatic analysis.

Results We analysed the sequencing results using alpha diversity, beta diversity and machine learning methods.

At both time points, 4 and 6 h after burning, the Firmicutes phylum content decreased and the content of the Bacteroidetes phylum content increased, showing a significant decrease in the Firmicutes/Bacteroidetes ratio compared to the control group.

Nine bacterial genera changed significantly during the acute phase and occupied the top six positions in the Random Forest significance ranking.

Clustering results also clearly showed that there was a clear boundary between the communities of burned and control mice.

Functional analyses showed that during the acute phase of burn, gut bacteria increased lipoic acid metabolism, seleno-compound metabolism, TCA cycling, and carbon fixation, while decreasing galactose metabolism and triglyceride metabolism.

Based on the abundance characteristics of the six significantly different bacterial genera, both the XGboost and Random Forest models were able to discriminate between the burn and control groups with 100% accuracy, while both the Random Forest and Support Vector Machine models were able to classify samples from the 4-hour and 6-hour burn groups with 86.7% accuracy.

Conclusions Our study shows an increase in gut microbiota diversity in the acute phase of deep burn injury, rather than a decrease as is commonly believed.

Severe burns result in a severe imbalance of the gut flora, with a decrease in probiotics and an increase in microorganisms that trigger inflammation and cognitive deficits, and multiple pathways of metabolism and substance synthesis are affected.

Simple machine learning model testing suggests several bacterial genera as potential biomarkers of severe burn phenotypes.