3.4 CUR reshapes the intestinal microflora composition of mice
Next, we further investigated the effect of CUR on the intestinal
microbiota of mice. We examined the V3 and V4 regions within the 16sRNA
of all mouse gut microbiota, and the rarefaction curves showed extremely
high coverage in every sample (Figure. 3A). From the principal
coordinate analysis (PCoA) results, we found a significant separation of
the microflora distribution between groups CON, IMQ and CUR (Figure.
3B). After analyzing the flora diversity among the CON, IMQ and CUR
groups, Simpson and Shannon index showed that the CON and CUR groups
were significantly higher than the IMQ group (Figure. 3C-D). Moreover,
the analysis of the microflora diversity results showed that it mainly
included 10 classes: Bacilli , Clostridia ,Bacteroidia , Desulfovibrionia , Deferribacteria ,Campylobacteria , Saccharimonadia , Coriobacteriia ,Gammaproteobacteria , Alphaproteobacteria (Figure. 4A).
For further exploring these data, we performed high dimensional analysis
by line discriminant analysis effect size (LEfSe) that determined
significant differences in the main flora between CON, IMQ and CUR
groups. The dominant flora was Lactobacillus at the genus level IMQ
group, which we speculated is due to reduced diversity of microflora.
The CUR group showed the dominant flora wereMucispirillum 、unclassified_desulfovibrionaceae at the
genus level, while Deferribacters , Desulfovibrionia at the
class level. The CON group revealed that the predominant flora wasRuminococcaceae at the family level (Supplementary Figure. 1A-B).
Subsequently, we performed Kruskal-Wallis test to detect the microflora
differences between the three groups. Compared with CON and CUR groups,
the relative abundance of Bacilli at the class level was marked
increased in IMQ group, while the result of Desulfovibrionia was
contrary (Figure. 4B-C). Moreover, compared with IMQ group, the relative
abundances of clostridia, Deferribacteres at the class level were
significantly promoted in the CUR group, while the result ofSaccharimonadia was opposite (Figure. 4B-C). Ultimately, at the
genus level, the abundance of Alistipes , Mucispirillum ,Rikenella in CON and CUR groups was markedly higher than in the
IMQ group (Figure. 5A-D).
3.5 Changed intestinal microflora by CUR was associated
with psoriasis-related factors
To further understand the role of altered gut microbiota by CUR and its
connections with psoriasis, we treated psoriasis-related inflammation
indicators as a variable by spearman correlation analysis at the genus
level based on OTU abundance, presented with a heatmap. As shown in
Figure.6A, Ligilactobacillus and Anaeroplasma (inhibited
in CUR mice) were positively correlated with multiple psoriasis-related
factors, such as IL-6, IL-17A, IL-22, Il-23, while Rikenella,
Alistipes, and Mucispirillum (promoted in CUR mice) were
negatively correlated with them. These results indicated that the gut
flora changes induced by CUR are associated with the inflammatory
factors in psoriasis.