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A single-cell genomics pipeline for environmental microbial eukaryotes.

ABSTRACT: Single-cell sequencing of environmental microorganisms is an essential component of the microbial ecology toolkit. However, large-scale targeted single-cell sequencing for the whole-genome recovery of uncultivated eukaryotes is lagging. The key challenges are low abundance in environmental communities, large complex genomes, and cell walls that are difficult to break. We describe a pipeline composed of state-of-the art single-cell genomics tools and protocols optimized for poorly studied and uncultivated eukaryotic microorganisms that are found at low abundance. This pipeline consists of seven distinct steps, beginning with sample collection and ending with genome annotation, each equipped with quality review steps to ensure high genome quality at low cost. We tested and evaluated each step on environmental samples and cultures of early-diverging lineages of fungi and Chromista/SAR. We show that genomes produced using this pipeline are almost as good as complete reference genomes for functional and comparative genomics for environmental microbial eukaryotes.

SUBMITTER: Ciobanu D

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8042348 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:BackgroundMost diversity in the eukaryotic tree of life is represented by microbial eukaryotes, which is a polyphyletic group also referred to as protists. Among the protists, currently sequenced genomes and transcriptomes give a biased view of the actual diversity. This biased view is partly caused by the scientific community, which has prioritized certain microbes of biomedical and agricultural importance. Additionally, some protists remain difficult to maintain in cultures, which further influences what has been studied. It is now possible to bypass the time-consuming process of cultivation and directly analyze the gene content of single protist cells. Single-cell genomics was used in the first experiments where individual protists cells were genomically explored. Unfortunately, single-cell genomics for protists is often associated with low genome recovery and the assembly process can be complicated because of repetitive intergenic regions. Sequencing repetitive sequences can be avoided if single-cell transcriptomics is used, which only targets the part of the genome that is transcribed.ResultsIn this study we test different modifications of Smart-seq2, a single-cell RNA sequencing protocol originally developed for mammalian cells, to establish a robust and more cost-efficient workflow for protists. The diplomonad Giardia intestinalis was used in all experiments and the available genome for this species allowed us to benchmark our results. We could observe increased transcript recovery when freeze-thaw cycles were added as an extra step to the Smart-seq2 protocol. Further we reduced the reaction volume and purified the amplified cDNA with alternative beads to test different cost-reducing changes of Smart-seq2. Neither improved the procedure, and reducing the volumes by half led to significantly fewer genes detected. We also added a 5' biotin modification to our primers and reduced the concentration of oligo-dT, to potentially reduce generation of artifacts. Except adding freeze-thaw cycles and reducing the volume, no other modifications lead to a significant change in gene detection. Therefore, we suggest adding freeze-thaw cycles to Smart-seq2 when working with protists and further consider our other modification described to improve cost and time-efficiency.ConclusionsThe presented single-cell RNA sequencing workflow represents an efficient method to explore the diversity and cell biology of individual protist cells.

Project description:Eukaryotic microbes (protists) residing in the vertebrate gut influence host health and disease, but their diversity and distribution in healthy hosts is poorly understood. Protists found in the gut are typically considered parasites, but many are commensal and some are beneficial. Further, the hygiene hypothesis predicts that association with our co-evolved microbial symbionts may be important to overall health. It is therefore imperative that we understand the normal diversity of our eukaryotic gut microbiota to test for such effects and avoid eliminating commensal organisms. We assembled a dataset of healthy individuals from two populations, one with traditional, agrarian lifestyles and a second with modern, westernized lifestyles, and characterized the human eukaryotic microbiota via high-throughput sequencing. To place the human gut microbiota within a broader context our dataset also includes gut samples from diverse mammals and samples from other aquatic and terrestrial environments. We curated the SILVA ribosomal database to reflect current knowledge of eukaryotic taxonomy and employ it as a phylogenetic framework to compare eukaryotic diversity across environment. We show that adults from the non-western population harbor a diverse community of protists, and diversity in the human gut is comparable to that in other mammals. However, the eukaryotic microbiota of the western population appears depauperate. The distribution of symbionts found in mammals reflects both host phylogeny and diet. Eukaryotic microbiota in the gut are less diverse and more patchily distributed than bacteria. More broadly, we show that eukaryotic communities in the gut are less diverse than in aquatic and terrestrial habitats, and few taxa are shared across habitat types, and diversity patterns of eukaryotes are correlated with those observed for bacteria. These results outline the distribution and diversity of microbial eukaryotic communities in the mammalian gut and across environments.

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A single-cell genomics pipeline for environmental microbial eukaryotes.

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