Abstract
Gut microbiome dysbiosis has been strongly associated with major changes to the gastrointestinal (GI) environment by various physiological conditions, with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and more recently, chronic alcohol intake noted as significant contributing factors. The disruption of the gut microbiota balance ultimately results in the activation of specific bacterial pathways associated with inflammation in GI tract (GIT) tissues. Previous literature has investigated the effects of both IBD and high alcohol consumption independently in affecting the gut microbiome. However, limited research has concomitantly studied whether these two conditions induce similar patterns and metabolic pathways of gut microbiota. Our study aimed to examine if low and high alcohol intake patients exhibit significant microbiome compositional and functional differences comparable to IBD’s dysbiosis patterns between Crohn’s Disease and Ulcerative Colitis, including metabolic pathways. We analysed 16S rRNA sequencing datasets from alcohol and IBD groups independently using QIIME2 and R for alpha, beta diversity and core taxa analyses, and PICRUSt2 was used for functional pathway analysis. Our findings show that the alcohol-intake patient groups did not exhibit significant differences in diversity, core microbiome, or metabolic functions. Therefore, chronic alcohol intake minimally disrupts microbiome diversity, core microbiome, and metabolic functions compared to IBD, and no shared functional pathways are identified between alcohol and IBD patient groups.