Hi everyone, hope your all doing well and have been able to keep up with the daily uploads. I know it seems like a lot although we are both gaining a great amount of knowledge, imagine being able to go on and on talking about the science behind Gut microbiomes.. i dont know about you but that would be my party trick. Anyways aside from the joking, today i wanted to put some data analysis skills to the test, which is why i gathered data about…. and put it into a bar graph form. Keep scrolling to see how i did it and to understand what the data is telling us!
Below you will find the data points (Gathered from BioMed “Aging Progression of human gut microbiota”:
| Age Group | Lactobacillus | Oscillospira | Oxalobacter | Butyrivibrio | Parvimonas | Corynebacterium |
| Young Adults (20-40 years) | 10 | 12 | 15 | 18 | 5 | 7 |
| Middle-aged Adults (41-64) | 8 | 10 | 12 | 15 | 10 | 12 |
| Younger-old (65-89 years) | 5 | 7 | 9 | 10 | 15 | 18 |
| Oldest-old (90+ years) | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 20 | 25 |
Analysis:
In the bar graph that I have created using the data points, I compared the amount of several key gut bacteria across four age groups: Young Adults (20-40 years), Middle-aged Adults (41-64), Younger-old (65-89 years), and Oldest-old (90+ years). The X-axis represents the age groups, and the Y-axis shows the abundance of each bacterium, scaled from 0 to 30. We observe that Lactobacillus, Oscillospira, Oxalobacter, and Butyrivibrio which all showed a decreasing relationship with age, this allowed me to conclude that it was due to a decline in good and beneficial gut bacteria that supports health, such as aiding in digestion and preventing kidney stones. For instance, Lactobacillus drops from 10 in young adults to 2 in the oldest-old, and Butyrivibrio decreases from 18 to 5, suggesting a reduction in short-chain fatty acid production. On the other hand, Parvimonas and Corynebacterium depicted an increasing trend, rising from 5 to 20 and 7 to 25 respectively, indicating a growth in bacteria associated with age-related diseases. These trends illustrate how our gut microbiome changes with age, emphasizing the importance of maintaining a healthy gut throughout life.