The dysbiosis of the gut microbiome associated with ulcerative colitis (UC) has been extensively studied in recent years. However, the question of whether UC influences the spatial heterogeneity of the human gut mucosal microbiome has not been addressed. Spatial heterogeneity (specifically, the inter-individual heterogeneity in microbial species abundances) is one of the most important characterizations at both population and community scales, and can be assessed and interpreted by Taylor’s power law (TPL) and its community-scale extensions (TPLEs). Due to the high mobility of microbes, it is difficult to investigate their spatial heterogeneity explicitly; however, TPLE offers an effective approach to implicitly analyze the microbial communities. Here, we investigated the influence of UC on the spatial heterogeneity of the gut microbiome with intestinal mucosal microbiome samples collected from 28 UC patients and healthy controls. Specifically, we applied Type-I TPLE for measuring community spatial heterogeneity and Type-III TPLE for measuring mixed-species population heterogeneity to evaluate the heterogeneity changes of the mucosal microbiome induced by UC at both the community and species scales. We further used permutation test to determine the possible differences between UC patients and healthy controls in heterogeneity scaling parameters. Results showed that UC did not significantly influence gut mucosal microbiome heterogeneity at either the community or mixed-species levels. These findings demonstrated significant resilience of the human gut microbiome and confirmed a prediction of TPLE: that the inter-subject heterogeneity scaling parameter of the gut microbiome is an intrinsic property to humans, invariant with UC disease.

近年来，与溃疡性结肠炎（UC）相关的肠道微生物组的营养不良已被广泛研究。然而，关于UC是否影响人类肠道粘膜微生物组的空间异质性的问题尚未得到解决。空间异质性（特别是微生物物种丰富度的个体间异质性）是人口和社区尺度上最重要的特征之一，可以通过泰勒幂定律（TPL）及其社区尺度扩展（TPLEs）进行评估和解释。 ）。由于微生物的高迁移率，很难明确研究它们的空间异质性。但是，TPLE提供了一种有效的方法来隐式分析微生物群落。这里，我们调查了UC对肠道微生物组空间异质性的影响，肠道微生物组具有从28名UC患者和健康对照中收集的肠粘膜微生物组样品。具体而言，我们应用I型TPLE来测量群落空间异质性，并应用III型TPLE来测量混合物种的种群异质性，以评估UC在群落和物种尺度上引起的粘膜微生物组异质性变化。我们进一步使用置换测试来确定异质性缩放参数中UC患者与健康对照之间的可能差异。结果表明，无论在群落水平还是在物种混合水平上，UC均未显着影响肠道粘膜微生物组的异质性。