The study of airway microbiome and mycobiome of COPD and AECOPD patients

Over 50% COPD exacerbations are due to pathogen infections including bacteria, fungi and virus. In recent years, more and more researches have highlighted the important role that airway microbiota plays in the progression of COPD despite its feature is not fully clarified since traditional studies failed to get sufficient number of subjects. Our study amplified the V4 region of 16S ribosomal RNA and ITS1 region of induced sputum from 181 COPD volunteers and 33 healthy volunteers to analyze the characteristics of airway bacteria and fungi community. It reveals that COPD individuals harbored more personalized airway microbiome than the healthy individuals. Overall, we found that Prevotella, Streptococcus and Neisseria were the main airway bacteria genera for both COPD patients and healthy people, while they were significantly different in the composition structure. The effect of random forest models of COPD and AECOPD groups is remarkable, and the AUC to distinguish the colonies of bacteria and fungi community between COPD and healthy people were 96.91 and 99.23, respectively. The relative abundance of some opportunistic pathogens under Burkholderiaceae, Flavobacteriaceae and Candida further increased in AECOPD patients. This study shows that the structure of airway microbiology community for COPD patients is unique and its bacterial and fungal community are significantly different from the control group. The airway microbiome and mycobiome changes further more in acute exacerbation conditions.