Abstract
Despite effective viral suppression with modern antiretroviral therapy, HIV remains a chronic condition with lasting systemic effects, including significant impacts on gut microbial ecology. We analyzed fecal bacterial (16S rRNA gene) and fungal (ITS) profiles from 94 men with HIV—the largest cohort of its kind in the Czech Republic—to determine how antiretroviral therapy (ART) regimen, treatment duration, and blood parameters shape gut microbiome diversity and composition. The bacteriome was dominated by Bacillota and Bacteroidota. Prevotella was the most abundant bacterial genus, while several genera commonly associated with SCFA production, including Faecalibacterium, were also detected. The mycobiome showed marked inter-individual variability, with Saccharomyces as the dominant genus. Ecological network analysis identified descriptive differences in microbial interactions between ART-duration groups, with a more interconnected network observed in participants with shorter ART duration. In addition, bacterial alpha diversity differed significantly according to ART duration. Several Prevotella-related taxa and members of the Lachnospiraceae family were associated with viral load, while triglyceride levels correlated with taxa including Alloprevotella and Prevotella 9. Overall, our findings suggest that differences associated with ART duration may be more apparent in microbial co-occurrence patterns than in overall taxonomic community composition.
Acknowledgements
Authors thank the RECETOX Research Infrastructure (No LM2023069) financed by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports for technical support.
Funding
This work was supported by the project National Institute of Virology and Bacteriology (Programme EXCELES, ID Project LX22NPO5103) – Funded by the European Union – Next Generation EU and by the Ministry of Health, Czech Republic – Conceptual Development of Research Organization (FNBr, 65269705).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing interests.
Additional information
Publisher’s note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Supplementary Information
Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.
Supplementary Material 1 (download XLSX )
Supplementary Material 2 (download XLSX )
Supplementary Material 3 (download DOCX )
Supplementary Material 4 (download PDF )
Rights and permissions
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
Reprints and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Daniela, B., Radek, S., Lenka, M. et al. Gut microbial community patterns are associated with HIV-related host parameters in a Prevotella– and Saccharomyces-rich cohort.
Sci Rep (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-70521-6
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-70521-6
Keywords
- Microbiome
- Mycobiome
- Gut
- HIV
- Antiretroviral therapy
- Sequencing
Source: Ecology - nature.com
