Louis Janicek

The gut microbiome has been noted to be influenced by host diet. Such is the case of fermented foods like kombucha, a fermented tea-based beverage, which has been linked to potential ameliorative effects on metabolic diseases through microbiome alteration. Recent intrigue has emphasized similar microbiome changes present in mental health diseases, making it meritorious to determine if kombucha can analogously improve mental health diseases. In this study, the microbiome-influencing effects of kombucha were evaluated in mouse (M. musculus) models to further understand if the microbiome can be a potential pathway through which mental health endpoints can be altered, focusing on the often-overlooked fungal portion of the microbiome: the mycobiome. Mice (n=24) were administered kombucha in a factorial-type experiment along with a high-fat, high-sugar diet (Total Western Diet; TWD) or a normal mouse (chow) diet, then sampled throughout the digestive tract. ITS2 markers were obtained from samples through MiSeq sequencing. Our results indicate that mycobiome composition in kombucha + TWD-fed mice had lower levels of within-sample diversity in all gut locations, albeit not significantly in the ileum. Contrastingly, kombucha + chow-fed mice had significantly higher amounts of amplicon sequence variants (ASVs) sampled in the colon than respective controls. Between samples, we noted significant disparity in observed community compositions in cecum + both diets and colon + TWD samples associated with kombucha. Our findings show kombucha’s dynamic impact on the host mycobiome (and therefore microbiome) and highlight the need for further mechanistic research behind microbiome-based disease causation.