Summary of Studies of the Gut Microbiome under PBM
Searching in NCBI and WOS yielded 330 articles, with 282 articles obtained after eliminating duplications (Fig. 1). Of these, 33 met our criteria for meta-analysis during pre-selection, while 16 lacked clear information regarding a specific, public location of sequencing data; 9 were missing metadata for analysis. Finally, datasets were acquired from 8 gut microbiome studies, two of which provided sequencing data and metadata after emailing the corresponding authors. Of the 442 samples included and their corresponding sequencing data, 213 samples lacked the corresponding metadata, so 229 valid samples were finally included, with 126 human samples and 103 animal samples. The relevant descriptions and metadata are listed in Table S1.
After a series of preprocessing, including denoising the sequencing data, OTUs which were not assigned at the genus level were discarded. Collapsing the data to the genus level reduced the sensitivity to fine-scale differences in species or strain abundances across case and control groups, but we were able to effectively attenuate batch effects affecting cross-study comparisons in meta-analysis. Nonetheless, one study (21) did not pass quality filtering and was removed from the analysis.
Community Diversity and Structure Significantly Change under PBM
For α diversity, in addition to wave bands (Fig. 2A-B), there were significant differences across species and authors (Fig S1). The same results were obtained from the analysis of β diversity distance (Fig S2). Therefore, we used GLMM to analyze α diversity to strip the role of minor factors in the influence of PBM on gut microbiome, and then explored the influence of different wave bands on the gut microbiome.
As expected, authors and species had a strong effect on both Chao1 richness and Shannon diversity as random effects (Fig S 3). After stripping away the random effects, we found that infrared irradiation in the model’s prediction leads to a significant decrease in the Chao1 index (P < 0.01), while visible light and ultraviolet radiation reduce and increase Chao1 richness, respectively, but neither was significant (Fig. 2C). For the Shannon diversity generalized linear hybrid model, the influence trend of the illumination band is basically the same as that of the Chao1 richness model, but the statistical results show that only ultraviolet radiation in the model’s prediction leads to a significant increase in the Shannon index (P < 0.01, Fig. 2D). Among these indices, Chao1 richness mainly characterizes the number of community species by the number of highly abundant species and the estimated number of rare species, while Shannon diversity superimposes the proportion of species on the basis of the number of species to characterize the uniformity of species distribution. Based on this, it appears that infrared and visible light irradiation mainly affect the total number of species of intestinal flora, resulting in a decrease in the α diversity of the gut microbiota. While ultraviolet irradiation has a certain impact on the total number of species, it also greatly improves the uniformity of species, thereby improving the α diversity of gut microbiota.
An interaction network can reflect the relationships of cooperation and competition between microorganisms, which drives the dynamic changes in the community composition and function of the gut microbiome, ultimately affecting the influence of the gut microbiome on the host. We constructed an interaction network at the genus level to analyze the changes in the gut microbiome under different wave bands of illumination, from the perspective of the community network. In four interacting networks, 40, 45, 60 and 29 nodes are connected by 76, 167, 183 and 64 edges, respectively (Fig. 3A). The network nodes are mainly Firmicutes and Bacteroidetes, and a change in the number of nodes of the two phyla was observed between the different groups, with the phyla Verrucomicrobia and Saccharibacteria increasing in the IR and UV groups (Fig. 3A). In addition, the weighted, proximity, and mediation centrality of the interaction network in the IR group were significantly greater than those in control group (Fig. 3B), indicating that the integrity of the gut microbiota and the interspecies information transfer efficiency after infrared irradiation were significantly improved. Analysis of the robustness also revealed that the average and natural connectivity of the IR group were markedly greater than those of the other groups (Fig. 3C). As for negative and positive cohesion, the proportion of positive cohesion in the IR group was significantly reduced (Fig. 3D), although relatively high in each group.
The Composition of the Gut Microbiota Exhibits an Opposite Response across Wave Bands
Preliminary observation of the stacked histogram of the phylum composition in different health states and wave bands (Fig. 4A) showed that the relative abundance of Verrucomicrobia and Saccharibacteria show similar trends to those in the interaction network. We first used GLMM model to explore the influence of light band on the change in relative abundance of the two phyla, using the beta distribution as a function distribution family of relative abundance between 0 and 1. For the GLMM model of Verrucomicrobia, we found that infrared irradiation led to a significant decrease in the relative abundance in the model (P < 0.05, Fig. 4B), while visible and ultraviolet irradiation increased the relative abundance, with the effect of visible light being particularly significant (P < 0.001, Fig. 4B). For the GLMM model of Saccharibacteria, we found that infrared irradiation led to a significant decrease in the genus’ relative abundance in the model (P < 0.001, Fig. 4C), while visible and ultraviolet radiation reduced and increased the relative abundance, respectively, but neither was significant. For the random-effects aspect of the two models, we found that author had a limited effect on the relative abundance of Verrucomicrobia (Fig S 4C), while the effect on Saccharibacteria was negligible (Fig S4A). In contrast, the effect of species was the inverse of the study authors (Fig S4B, D).
We next used LDA effective size (LEfSe) to determine the changes in bacterial abundance in the gut microbiome related to PBM, especially Verrucomicrobia. As shown in the species taxonomic clade (Fig. 4D), the Verrucomicrobia phylum was significantly enriched in the PBM and UV groups, which is basically consistent with the prediction of the generalized linear mixing model. Notably, at the genus taxonomic level, the visible light-irradiated PBM group was enriched with Akkermansia muciniphila of the Verrucomicrobia phylum, based on a generalized linear mixed model to simulate the relative abundance changes of only this genus; the same significant results were obtained (P < 0.001, Fig S6), while infrared irradiation of PBM significantly reduced the abundance of this genus (P < 0.05, Fig S6). This genus of probiotics was first identified in the early 21st century. Its deficiency or decrease has been associated with a variety of diseases, such as obesity, diabetes, hepatic steatosis, inflammation, and malignancy(22).
In order to explore the changes in the gut microbiome, especially probiotics, under different wave bands more generally, we further constructed a random forest classifier of five-fold cross-validation using species classification data down to the genus level as input, and identified key bacterial genera as biomarker taxa associated with different wavelength light. The cross-validated error curve tended to stabilize when 20 genera were used (Fig S5), so these 20 genera were used as biomarker taxa. According to the model prediction results (Fig. 4E), the 20 marker genera were distributed in the four phyla of Firmicutes, Proteobacteria, Bacteroidetes and Actinobacteria, which predominate the gut microbiome. Among these, the proportion of markers from the phylum Firmicutes was up to 12, and four of the five most abundant genera belonged to this phylum. The rho heat map reveals that nearly half of the marker genera showed high relative abundance in the IR group, that is, as microbial markers of infrared irradiation, while three of the top five genera showed high relative abundance in the IR group (Fig. 4F).
Infrared Exerts Negative Effects on Functional Pathways of the Gut Microbiome
We examined the functional Pathways associated with gut microbiome compositions using the Tax4Fun software. Among the pathways with relative abundance above 1% (Fig. 5A), metabolism-related pathways accounted for more than 50%, with the Kruskal-Wallis test of KEGG level 2 pathways showing that there were significant differences in xenobiotics biodegradation and metabolism, and metabolism of various nutrients (P < 0.05). In terms of genetic and environmental information processing, although genetic translation had no significant differences, gene replication, repair, and folding and sorting and degradation pathways were significantly different (P < 0.05); the associated signal transduction and membrane transport pathways also displayed more significant changes (P < 0.01). In addition, prokaryotic cellular processes exhibited significant changes (P < 0.01, Fig. 5S). In general, there was trend that infrared light decreased pathway expression while ultraviolet increased it. For pathways with unique changes in one group, infrared significantly changed the expression of more pathways, which manifested as a decrease in cellular processes of prokaryotes and an increase in the pathways of genetic information. In the other two groups, UV increased glycan biosynthesis and metabolism, and reduced the expression of membrane transport pathways. In contrast, the PBM group exhibited a weaker effect on function and metabolic pathways than the other two groups, which may be attributed to the relatively weak penetration of visible light. Of note, the gut microbiome in the IR group produced a significant reduction in antimicrobial resistance (P < 0.05), though there was no difference in the intergroup comparison.
We also analyzed those KEGG level 3 pathways that belonged to the KEGG level 2 pathways which had unique changes in each group (Fig. 5B-C). For the IR group, three pathways related to biofilm formation were significantly reduced under infrared irradiation (P < 0.05); drug resistance to cationic antimicrobial peptide (CAMP) and beta − lactam also decreased. In terms of genetic information processing, the expression of sulfur relay system and protein export was upregulated (P < 0.01), while the expression of gene repair pathways, such as base excision and mismatch repair, as well as DNA replication pathways closely related to microbial reproduction, were significantly increased (P < 0.05).
For the UV group, we found that the expression of five pathways related to glycosphingolipid biosynthesis and degradation was significantly increased (P < 0.05), and the expression of N-glycan biosynthesis and some of the glycan degradation pathways was also significantly increased (P < 0.001). The group UV generally showed a marked upward regulation trend in the expression of each pathway.