Project description:Changes in the relative abundances of many intestinal microorganisms, both those that naturally occur in the human gut microbiome and those that are considered pathogens, have been associated with a range of diseases. To more accurately diagnose health conditions, medical practitioners could benefit from a molecular, culture-independent assay for the quantification of these microorganisms in the context of a healthy reference range. Here we present the targeted sequencing of the microbial 16S rRNA gene of clinically relevant gut microorganisms as a method to provide a gut screening test that could assist in the clinical diagnosis of certain health conditions. We evaluated the possibility of detecting 46 clinical prokaryotic targets in the human gut, 28 of which could be identified with high precision and sensitivity by a bioinformatics pipeline that includes sequence analysis and taxonomic annotation. These targets included 20 commensal, 3 beneficial (probiotic), and 5 pathogenic intestinal microbial taxa. Using stool microbiome samples from a cohort of 897 healthy individuals, we established a reference range defining clinically relevant relative levels for each of the 28 targets. Our assay quantifies 28 targets in the context of a healthy reference range and correctly reflected 38/38 verification samples of real and synthetic stool material containing known gut pathogens. Thus, we have established a method to determine microbiome composition with a focus on clinically relevant taxa, which has the potential to contribute to patient diagnosis, treatment, and monitoring. More broadly, our method can facilitate epidemiological studies of the microbiome as it relates to overall human health and disease.
Project description:According to World Health Organization statistics of 2011, infectious diseases remain in the top five causes of mortality worldwide. However, despite sophisticated research tools for microbial detection, rapid and accurate molecular diagnostics for identification of infection in humans have not been extensively adopted. Time-consuming culture-based methods remain to the forefront of clinical microbial detection. The 16S rRNA gene, a molecular marker for identification of bacterial species, is ubiquitous to members of this domain and, thanks to ever-expanding databases of sequence information, a useful tool for bacterial identification. In this study, we assembled an extensive repository of clinical isolates (n = 617), representing 30 medically important pathogenic species and originally identified using traditional culture-based or non-16S molecular methods. This strain repository was used to systematically evaluate the ability of 16S rRNA for species level identification. To enable the most accurate species level classification based on the paucity of sequence data accumulated in public databases, we built a Naïve Bayes classifier representing a diverse set of high-quality sequences from medically important bacterial organisms. We show that for species identification, a model-based approach is superior to an alignment based method. Overall, between 16S gene based and clinical identities, our study shows a genus-level concordance rate of 96% and a species-level concordance rate of 87.5%. We point to multiple cases of probable clinical misidentification with traditional culture based identification across a wide range of gram-negative rods and gram-positive cocci as well as common gram-negative cocci.
Project description:BackgroundStreptococcus is an economically important genus as a number of species belonging to this genus are human and animal pathogens. The genus has been divided into different groups based on 16S rRNA gene sequence similarity. The variability observed among the members of these groups is low and it is difficult to distinguish them. The present study was taken up to explore 16S rRNA gene sequence to develop methods that can be used for preliminary identification and can supplement the existing methods for identification of clinically-relevant isolates of the genus Streptococcus.Methods16S rRNA gene sequences belonging to the isolates of S. dysgalactiae, S. equi, S. pyogenes, S. agalactiae, S. bovis, S. gallolyticus, S. mutans, S. sobrinus, S. mitis, S. pneumoniae, S. thermophilus and S. anginosus were analyzed with the purpose to define genetic variability within each species to generate a phylogenetic framework, to identify species-specific signatures and in-silico restriction enzyme analysis.ResultsThe framework based analysis was used to segregate Streptococcus spp. previously identified upto genus level. This segregation was validated using species-specific signatures and in-silico restriction enzyme analysis. 43 uncharacterized Streptococcus spp. could be identified using this approach.ConclusionsThe markers generated exploring 16S rRNA gene sequences provided useful tool that can be further used for identification of different species of the genus Streptococcus.
Project description:The human oral microbiome is known to play a significant role in human health and disease. While less well studied, the feline oral microbiome is thought to play a similarly important role. To determine roles oral bacteria play in health and disease, one first has to be able to accurately identify bacterial species present. 16S rRNA gene sequence information is widely used for molecular identification of bacteria and is also useful for establishing the taxonomy of novel species. The objective of this research was to obtain full 16S rRNA gene reference sequences for feline oral bacteria, place the sequences in species-level phylotypes, and create a curated 16S rRNA based taxonomy for common feline oral bacteria. Clone libraries were produced using "universal" and phylum-selective PCR primers and DNA from pooled subgingival plaque from healthy and periodontally diseased cats. Bacteria in subgingival samples were also cultivated to obtain isolates. Full-length 16S rDNA sequences were determined for clones and isolates that represent 171 feline oral taxa. A provisional curated taxonomy was developed based on the position of each taxon in 16S rRNA phylogenetic trees. The feline oral microbiome curated taxonomy and 16S rRNA gene reference set will allow investigators to refer to precisely defined bacterial taxa. A provisional name such as "Propionibacterium sp. feline oral taxon FOT-327" is an anchor to which clone, strain or GenBank names or accession numbers can point. Future next-generation-sequencing studies of feline oral bacteria will be able to map reads to taxonomically curated full-length 16S rRNA gene sequences.
Project description:The acquisition of antimicrobial resistance (AR) genes has rendered important pathogens nearly or fully unresponsive to antibiotics. It has been suggested that pathogens acquire AR traits from the gut microbiota, which collectively serve as a global reservoir for AR genes conferring resistance to all classes of antibiotics. However, only a subset of AR genes confers resistance to clinically relevant antibiotics, and, although these AR gene profiles are well-characterized for common pathogens, less is known about their taxonomic associations and transfer potential within diverse members of the gut microbiota. We examined a collection of 14,850 human metagenomes and 1666 environmental metagenomes from 33 countries, in addition to nearly 600,000 isolate genomes, to gain insight into the global prevalence and taxonomic range of clinically relevant AR genes. We find that several of the most concerning AR genes, such as those encoding the cephalosporinase CTX-M and carbapenemases KPC, IMP, NDM, and VIM, remain taxonomically restricted to Proteobacteria. Even cfiA, the most common carbapenemase gene within the human gut microbiome, remains tightly restricted to Bacteroides, despite being found on a mobilizable plasmid. We confirmed these findings in gut microbiome samples from India, Honduras, Pakistan, and Vietnam, using a high-sensitivity single-cell fusion PCR approach. Focusing on a set of genes encoding carbapenemases and cephalosporinases, thus far restricted to Bacteroides species, we find that few mutations are required for efficacy in a different phylum, raising the question of why these genes have not spread more widely. Overall, these data suggest that globally prevalent, clinically relevant AR genes have not yet established themselves across diverse commensal gut microbiota.
Project description:Bacteria comprise the most diverse domain of life on Earth, where they occupy nearly every possible ecological niche and play key roles in biological and chemical processes. Studying the composition and ecology of bacterial ecosystems and understanding their function is of prime importance. High-throughput sequencing technologies enable nearly comprehensive descriptions of bacterial diversity through 16S ribosomal RNA gene amplicons. Analyses of these communities generally rely upon taxonomic assignments through reference databases, or clustering approaches using de facto sequence similarity thresholds to identify operational taxonomic units. However, these methods often fail to resolve ecologically meaningful differences between closely related organisms in complex microbial datasets.In this paper we describe oligotyping, a novel supervised computational method that allows researchers to investigate the diversity of closely related but distinct bacterial organisms in final operational taxonomic units identified in environmental datasets through 16S ribosomal RNA gene data by the canonical approaches.Our analysis of two datasets from two distinct environments demonstrates the capacity of oligotyping at discriminating distinct microbial populations of ecological importance.Oligotyping can resolve the distribution of closely related organisms across environments and unveil previously overlooked ecological patterns for microbial communities. The URL http://oligotyping.org offers an open-source software pipeline for oligotyping.
Project description:BackgroundSample storage conditions, extraction methods, PCR primers, and parameters are major factors that affect metagenomics analysis based on microbial 16S rRNA gene sequencing. Most published studies were limited to the comparison of only one or two types of these factors. Systematic multi-factor explorations are needed to evaluate the conditions that may impact validity of a microbiome analysis. This study was aimed to improve methodological options to facilitate the best technical approaches in the design of a microbiome study. Three readily available mock bacterial community materials and two commercial extraction techniques, Qiagen DNeasy and MO BIO PowerSoil DNA purification methods, were used to assess procedures for 16S ribosomal DNA amplification and pyrosequencing-based analysis. Primers were chosen for 16S rDNA quantitative PCR and amplification of region V3 to V1. Swabs spiked with mock bacterial community cells and clinical oropharyngeal swabs were incubated at respective temperatures of -80°C, -20°C, 4°C, and 37°C for 4 weeks, then extracted with the two methods, and subjected to pyrosequencing and taxonomic and statistical analyses to investigate microbiome profile stability.ResultsThe bacterial compositions for the mock community DNA samples determined in this study were consistent with the projected levels and agreed with the literature. The quantitation accuracy of abundances for several genera was improved with changes made to the standard Human Microbiome Project (HMP) procedure. The data for the samples purified with DNeasy and PowerSoil methods were statistically distinct; however, both results were reproducible and in good agreement with each other. The temperature effect on storage stability was investigated by using mock community cells and showed that the microbial community profiles were altered with the increase in incubation temperature. However, this phenomenon was not detected when clinical oropharyngeal swabs were used in the experiment.ConclusionsMock community materials originated from the HMP study are valuable controls in developing 16S metagenomics analysis procedures. Long-term exposure to a high temperature may introduce variation into analysis for oropharyngeal swabs, suggestive of storage at 4°C or lower. The observed variations due to sample storage temperature are in a similar range as the intrapersonal variability among different clinical oropharyngeal swab samples.
Project description:BackgroundThe study of the human microbiome is crucial for understanding disease mechanisms, identifying biomarkers, and guiding preventive measures. Advances in sequencing platforms, particularly 16S rRNA sequencing, have revolutionized microbiome research. Despite the benefits, large microbiome reference databases (DBs) pose challenges, including computational demands and potential inaccuracies. This study aimed to determine if full-length 16S rRNA sequencing data produced by PacBio could be used to optimize reference DBs and be applied to Illumina V3-V4 targeted sequencing data for microbial study.MethodsOral and gut microbiome data (PRJNA1049979) were retrieved from NCBI. DADA2 was applied to full-length 16S rRNA PacBio data to obtain amplicon sequencing variants (ASVs). The RDP reference DB was used to assign the ASVs, which were then used as a reference DB to train the classifier. QIIME2 was used for V3-V4 targeted Illumina data analysis. BLAST was used to analyze alignment statistics. Linear discriminant analysis Effect Size (LEfSe) was employed for discriminant analysis.ResultsASVs produced by PacBio showed coverage of the oral microbiome similar to the Human Oral Microbiome Database. A phylogenetic tree was trimmed at various thresholds to obtain an optimized reference DB. This established method was then applied to gut microbiome data, and the optimized gut microbiome reference DB provided improved taxa classification and biomarker discovery efficiency.ConclusionFull-length 16S rRNA sequencing data produced by PacBio can be used to construct a microbiome reference DB. Utilizing an optimized reference DB can increase the accuracy of microbiome classification and enhance biomarker discovery.