الفهرس 
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Abstract
We analyzed the fecal microbiomes of seven patients with HCV and in comparison to eight healthy individuals from the same geographical area and validated the data by comparing them to a larger data set randomly selected from the American Gut samples. Patients with HCV had a few significant changes that may be related to liver-controlled homeostasis, protein synthesis, lipid digestion, or possibly to bacterial translocation, immune modulation, or a combination of all of the above mechanisms.
We suggest a brief model that could explain the changes we observed in microbiota. This model can serve as a working hypothesis for future studies with larger number of samples, or deeper analysis of metagenomic sequence reads. The role of Prevotella/Faecalibacterium vs. Ruminococcus/ Bifidobacterium relative abundance as biomarkers for chronic HCV infections, or disease progression is worth further investigations.
Also, we showed that the micobiome of HCV patients have been affected at all of the taxa levels after receiving the treatment protocol through the three months of treatment, giving us a strong evidence about the effect of the immunological interplay with the microbial community structure, abundance and diversity. As a result of the diversity decrease and composition changes, we observed a significant functional shifts of these microbial communities of the HCV patients suggesting the potential effect of these changes at the treatment protocol metabolism and eventually the treatment protocol efficacy outcome on these patients.