Title

P285 – Occupational Environments are Associated with Distinct Oral and Gut Microbiome–metabolome Profiles

10:25
Friday August 21st
Station 09
Duration: 12 minutes 
03. Human identification
Shujie Dou

The profound health impacts of distinct long-term work environments, such as indoor sedentary versus outdoor physical labor, remain poorly understood at the microbial and metabolic levels. Here, using an integrated metagenomic and metabolomic approach, we systematically compared the oral and gut ecosystems of indoor sedentary workers (university teachers) and outdoor physical laborers (construction and transportation workers). Our analysis revealed stark, niche-specific differences: outdoor laborers exhibited higher salivary microbial diversity, reflecting greater environmental contact, whereas indoor workers displayed higher gut microbial diversity but a marked reduction in microbial resistance genes, aligning with lower pollutant exposure. Crucially, causal mediation analysis of the “environment-microbiome-metabolite” axis uncovered fundamentally different regulatory logics in oral versus gut niches. The oral ecosystem operates on a “push-and-pull” model of co-existing positive and negative mediation; notably, the indoor sedentary lifestyle elevates the key metabolic risk marker, uric acid, by suppressing purine-competing Prevotella species. In stark contrast, the gut ecosystem displays a deterministic architecture of uniform suppression, where diverse microbial shifts driven by the indoor workstyle converge in a “many-to-one” fashion to robustly inhibit a small set of metabolites, with a single exogenous steroid derivative acting as the primary target. These distinct signatures are highly predictive, with salivary metabolome data distinguishing the two groups with up to 98.04% accuracy. Collectively, this study establishes that multi-omics profiles serve as a sensitive “biological archive” of an individual’s work environment, offering novel biomarkers for health monitoring and forensic inference, and identifying tangible microbe-metabolite targets for precision interventions tailored to lifestyle-specific risks.

Authors

  • Shujie Dou (Hebei Medical University, China)
  • Guangping Fu (Hebei Medical University, China)
  • Saili Liu (The Second Affiliated Hospital of Xingtai Medical College, China)
  • Jing Han (Hebei Medical University, China)
  • Qingxiang Mu (Hebei Medical University, China)
  • Xinrui Song (Hebei Medical University, China)
  • Yangnuo Wang (Hebei Medical University, China)
  • Guanju Ma (Hebei Medical University, China)
  • Bin Cong (Hebei Medical University, China)
  • Shujin Li (Hebei Medical University, China)

On the same topic