Unravelling Diabetes-related Pathways Using 16S rRNA Microbiome Data from Human Gut and Nasal Cavity

Type 2 Diabetes (T2D) is a complex chronic illness that affects around 90% of diabetic patients worldwide. Prediabetes is an elementary phase for T2D that is recommended to be early diagnosed to prevent its progression. In this study, we used 16S rRNA data from the gut and nasal cavity of prediabetic and control patients to identify common and exclusive diabetic pathways for each body site. Furthermore, using the Phylogenetic Investigation of Communities by Reconstruction of Unobserved States (PICRUSt) as well as MicobiomeExplorer in the pathway enrichment analysis, we also identified the pathways that are able to differentiate between prediabetic and control patients. Moreover, our study highlights some important aspects, (1) the number of differentially enriched pathways in the nasal cavity is two times more than that in the gut; 22 and 11 respectively, (2) Cardiac muscle contraction and Parkinson's disease were the only common pathways identified from the data of gut and nasal cavity, (3) The difference in the values of pathways enrichment in prediabetic and control was more explored in the gut microbial community than in the nasal cavity, (4) the gut's data showed higher diagnostic power than the nasal cavity's data in differentiation between the prediabetic and control patients. In conclusion, the microbiome data could lead to biologically relevant insights on the progression of human diseases. Moreover, the gut microbiome is more susceptible to the prediabetes pathogenesis than the nasal cavity microbiome.