Novel Systems Biology Techniques
Research Article | Novel Systems Biology TechniquesCharacterization of the Pig Gut Microbiome and Antibiotic Resistome in Industrialized Feedlots in ChinaThe gut microbiota is believed to be closely related to many important physical functions in the host. Comprehensive data on mammalian gut metagenomes has facilitated research on host-microbiome interaction mechanisms, but less is known about pig gut microbiome, especially the gut microbiome in industrialized feedlot pigs, compared with human microbiome. On the other hand, pig production, as an important source of food, is believed to...
Research Article | Novel Systems Biology TechniquesSimultaneous Tracking of Pseudomonas aeruginosa Motility in Liquid and at the Solid-Liquid Interface Reveals Differential Roles for the Flagellar StatorsWe have established a methodology to enable the movement of individual bacterial cells to be followed within a 3D space without requiring any labeling. Such an approach is important to observe and understand how bacteria interact with surfaces and form biofilm. We investigated the swimming behavior of Pseudomonas aeruginosa, which has two flagellar stators that drive...
Research Article | Novel Systems Biology TechniquesTheoretical and Simulation-Based Investigation of the Relationship between Sequencing Effort, Microbial Community Richness, and Diversity in Binning Metagenome-Assembled GenomesShort-read sequencing with Illumina sequencing technology provides an accurate, high-throughput method for characterizing the metabolic potential of microbial communities. Short-read sequences can be assembled and binned into metagenome-assembled genomes, thus shedding light on the function of microbial ecosystems that are important for health, agriculture, and Earth system processes. The work presented here provides an analytical...
Editor's Pick Research Article | Novel Systems Biology TechniquesA Metabolome- and Metagenome-Wide Association Network Reveals Microbial Natural Products and Microbial Biotransformation Products from the Human MicrobiotaExperimental advances have enabled the acquisition of tandem mass spectrometry and metagenomics sequencing data from tens of thousands of environmental/host-oriented microbial communities. Each of these communities contains hundreds of microbial features (corresponding to microbial species) and thousands of molecular features (corresponding to microbial natural products). However, with the current technology, it is very difficult to...
Research Article | Novel Systems Biology TechniquesMouse Gut Microbiome-Encoded β-Glucuronidases Identified Using Metagenome Analysis Guided by Protein StructureMice are commonly employed as model organisms of mammalian disease; as such, our understanding of the compositions of their gut microbiomes is critical to appreciating how the mouse and human gastrointestinal tracts mirror one another. GUS enzymes, with importance in normal physiology and disease, are an attractive set of proteins to use for such analyses. Here we show that while the specific GUS enzymes differ at the sequence level, a...
Research Article | Novel Systems Biology TechniquesSpecies Deletions from Microbiome Consortia Reveal Key Metabolic Interactions between Gut MicrobesGut microbes associate, compete for, and specialize in specific metabolic tasks. These interactions are dictated by the cross-feeding of degradation or fermentation products. However, the individual contribution of microbes to the function of the gut microbiome is difficult to evaluate. It is essential to understand the complexity of microbial interactions and how the presence or absence of specific microorganisms affects the stability...
Observation | Novel Systems Biology Techniquesredbiom: a Rapid Sample Discovery and Feature Characterization SystemAlthough analyses that combine many microbiomes at the whole-community level have become routine, searching rapidly for microbiomes that contain a particular sequence has remained difficult. The software we present here, redbiom, dramatically accelerates this process, allowing samples that contain microbiome features to be rapidly identified. This is especially useful when taxonomic annotation is limited, allowing users to identify...
Research Article | Novel Systems Biology TechniquesQuantifying and Understanding Well-to-Well Contamination in Microbiome ResearchMicrobiome research has uncovered magnificent biological and chemical stories across nearly all areas of life science, at times creating controversy when findings reveal fantastic descriptions of microbes living and even thriving in what were once thought to be sterile environments. Scientists have refuted many of these claims because of contamination, which has led to robust requirements, including the use of controls, for validating...
Special Issue Perspective | Novel Systems Biology TechniquesDetermining Microbial Niche Breadth in the Environment for Better Ecosystem Fate PredictionsIntegrated omics applied to microbial communities offers a great opportunity to analyze the niche breadths (i.e., resource and condition ranges usable by a species) of constituent populations, ranging from generalists, with a broad niche breadth, to specialists, with a narrow one. In this context, extracellular metabolomics measurements describe resource spaces available to microbial populations; dedicated analyses of metagenomics data...
Research Article | Novel Systems Biology TechniquesControlling for Contaminants in Low-Biomass 16S rRNA Gene Sequencing ExperimentsThe relative scarcity of microbes in low-microbial-biomass environments makes accurate determination of community composition challenging. Identifying and controlling for contaminant bacterial DNA are critical steps in understanding microbial communities from these low-biomass environments. Our study introduces the use of a mock community dilution series as a positive control and evaluates four computational strategies that can identify...