Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) belongs to idiopathic, fatal neurodegenerative disease of the human motor system (Gordon, 2011), characterized by the loss of neurons at all levels of the motor system—from the cortex to the anterior horn of the spinal cord (Kiernan et al., 2011). The scientific and clinical interest in ALS is growing since the 1990s, and survival in ALS is now understood to be dependent on clinical presentation (phenotype), rate of disease progression, early presence of respiratory failure, and the nutritional status of patients (Kiernan et al., 2011; Fang, 2015). Unfortunately, less than 50% of patients can survive within 3 years of onset (Gordon, 2011; Kiernan et al., 2011; Fang, 2015).

The human gastrointestinal tract is home to bacterial communities, and the microbes have profound implications on human metabolism, immunity and the gut-brain axis (Derrien and van Hylckama Vlieg, 2015; Sivan et al., 2015; Yu et al., 2015; Zhernakova et al., 2016), and numerous studies have highlighted interactions between the central nervous system (CNS) and the gastrointestinal system (Erny et al., 2015; Wang et al., 2016). The brain may modulate peripheral gut functions to modify the gastrointestinal composition via releasing gut factors (hormones, neurotransmitters, immune factors), and the gut microbes, on the other hand, interact with the CNS by releasing of neurotransmitters, e.g., nitric oxide (NO, a major neurotransmitter in the brain) and g-aminobutyric acid (GABA, neurotransmitter produced Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium) (Rhee et al., 2009; Barrett, 2014; Williams et al., 2014; Cani and Knauf, 2016). Short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs), the specific metabolites generated by gut bacteria, can cross the blood–brain barrier and its levels in the feces could be correlated negatively or positively (Serre et al., 2015) with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) (Adams et al., 2011). Moreover, researchers found that lipopolysaccharide (LPS), a constituent of Gram-negative bacteria markedly affected vagal afferent neuron function, with reduced vagal afferent leptin signaling (Serre et al., 2015).

Intestinal barrier dysfunction may promote the passage of toxins in the intestinal lumen into the blood, and the innate immune response and increased circulating LPS play pivotal roles in the pathogenesis of ALS (Nguyen et al., 2004; Zhang et al., 2009). Furthermore, reduced tight junction proteins in the lumbar spinal cord, as well as the disruption of tissue barriers (the blood–spinal cord barrier and the blood–brain barrier) were identified both in ALS patients and animal models (Longstreth et al., 2005). However, the interaction of the gut microbiota with the ALS has not been investigated.

In the past, only a small fraction of all bacteria have been isolated and characterized severely limited by available technology and the shortage of reference genomes (Yue-Xin et al., 2003; Shokralla et al., 2012), and recent technological advances in next generation sequencing technology has enabled elucidation of the pleiotropic effects of microorganisms on the human host (Derrien and van Hylckama Vlieg, 2015; Sivan et al., 2015; Yu et al., 2015; Zhernakova et al., 2016). In the present study, the high-throughput sequencing analyses were used to assess the interaction of the gut microbiota and the ALS, which proves basic data for the prevention and treatment of ALS.

Accumulating clinical- and scientific research-based evidence is driving our increased awareness of the significance of the human microbiome (HM) to the healthy and homeostatic operation of the human CNS (Grenham et al., 2011; Hill et al., 2014; Fang, 2015; Kennedy et al., 2016). ALS belongs to neurodegenerative disease characterized by the loss of motor neurons (Scarrott et al., 2015), and the prevalence rate for ALS is substantially lower at 3.9/100000 in the United States (Mehta, 2015). To date, the pathogenesis of ALS remains unclear and is likely multifactorial, and the pathophysiology of ALS may be related to the gastrointestinal tract. The gut microbiota, which is also referred to as the second brain, may affect brain activity through the gut-microbiota–brain axis under both physiological and pathological conditions (Mayer et al., 2015; Sampson and Mazmanian, 2015), and accumulating evidence suggests that microbiota changes in the gastrointestinal tract of individuals possessed strong connection with neurological diseases and specifically, neurodegenerative diseases (Catanzaro et al., 2015).

In this study, high-throughput sequencing technology was used to compare the microbiota in intestinal tract of healthy people and ALS patients. To evaluate the tag quality, the raw tags, clean tags, average bp and OTUs in per sample were compared, and the mean number of 72972.36 clean tags, average length of 453 bp (Table 1), and the saturated Chao1 index and rarefaction curve ensured their reliability for the future analysis (Supplementary Figure S1).

In Figure 1, the Venn figure reflected a high percent of 43.78% of common OTUs in H group, and a low percent of 17.56% of common OTUs in A group, which indicated that the ALS, together with individual physiological status, had severely changed the microbial composition in patients feces, which deviating from the normal microbiota and characterized by the overgrowth of total OTU number and low percent of common OTUs. Moreover, the clustered samples A1, A2, A3, A4, and A6, as well as the clustered samples H1, H2, H3, H4, and H5 using PCoA and UPGMA method further conformed the microbial changes in feces of ALS patients (Figure 2).

Then, the top 10 microorganism populations were analyzed at genus level, and average ratios of Bacteroides, Faecalibacterium, Anaerostipes, Prevotella, Escherichia, and Lachnospira between groups A and H were 0.78, 2.18, 3.41, 0.35, 0.79, and 13.07 (Figure 3). Furthermore, supervised comparisons by LEfSE (LDA > 4.0) were performed to find the significant changed bacteria, and the relative richness of Firmicutes at phylum level, Clostridia at class level, Clostridiales at order level, Lachnospiraceae and Family XIII at family level, Oscillibacter, Anaerostipes and Lachnospiraceae at genus level in group H were significant higher than that in group A, while Bacteroidetes at phylum level, Bacteroidia at class level, Bacteroidales at order level and Dorea at genus level were significant higher in group A (Figure 4).

In healthy adults, 80% of the identified fecal microbes can be classified into three dominant phyla: Bacteroidetes, Firmicutes, and Actinobacteria, and the Firmicutes to Bacteroidetes ratio is regarded to be of significant relevance with human health (Mariat et al., 2009), and the significant increase of Firmicutes in H group and significant increase of Bacteroidetes in A group indicated that the ALS has seriously influenced patients’ healthy, characterized by the decreased Firmicutes/Bacteroidetes ratio. At genus level, the Dorea in group A was significant higher than that in healthy people, whose major end products of glucose metabolism are ethanol (Vos et al., 2011). Moreover, the significant decrease of Oscillibacter (was found in significantly more samples from healthy control test subjects than from patients diagnosed with Crohn’s disease; Mondot et al., 2011), Anaerostipes (represents more than 2% of total colonic microbiota in the healthy colon, and are believed to play an important functional role in the gut ecosystem due to their ability to produce butyrate from lactate; Bui et al., 2014) and Lachnospiraceae (can protect from colon cancer in humans by producing butyric acid; Meehan and Beiko, 2014) in group A further confirmed the interaction of ALS with intestinal microbiota.

In summary, we found that host microbiota were markedly different in health and disease, and the overgrowing of pathogens and reduction of probiotic organisms in intestines of ALS patients might up-regulated or down-regulated the production of NO, GABA, SCFAs, and LPS, which eventually increased the pathogenesis of ALS, and the ALS conversely aggravated the imbalances of intestinal microbiota, causing a vicious circle for host health. In the present study, we provide basic data to clarify the key bacteria during disease occurring, which may assist our understanding and treatment of ALS by inhibiting the growth of pathogens and enhancing the number of probiotics.

TC designed the experiment; XF, XnW, SY, FM, and XaW performed the experiments; TC and HW analyzed the data and wrote the manuscript. All authors discussed the results and commented on the manuscript.

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.