Novel Systems Biology Techniques
Editor's Pick Research Article | Novel Systems Biology TechniquesGenetic and Transcriptional Analysis of Human Host Response to Healthy Gut MicrobiotaThe study of host-microbiota interactions in humans is largely limited to identifying associations between microbial communities and host phenotypes. While these studies have generated important insights on the links between the microbiota and human disease, the assessment of cause-and-effect relationships has been challenging. Although this relationship can be studied in germfree mice, this system is costly, and it is difficult to...
Editor's Pick Research Article | Novel Systems Biology TechniquesMoleculo Long-Read Sequencing Facilitates Assembly and Genomic Binning from Complex Soil MetagenomesSoil microorganisms carry out key processes for life on our planet, including cycling of carbon and other nutrients and supporting growth of plants. However, there is poor molecular-level understanding of their functional roles in ecosystem stability and responses to environmental perturbations. This knowledge gap is largely due to the difficulty in culturing the majority of soil microbes. Thus, use of culture-independent approaches,...
Research Article | Novel Systems Biology TechniquesA Universal Next-Generation Sequencing Protocol To Generate Noninfectious Barcoded cDNA Libraries from High-Containment RNA VirusesThis report establishes and validates a standard operating procedure (SOP) for select agents (SAs) and other biosafety level 3 and/or 4 (BSL-3/4) RNA viruses to rapidly generate noninfectious, barcoded cDNA amenable for next-generation sequencing (NGS). This eliminates the burden of testing all processed samples derived from high-consequence pathogens prior to transfer from high-containment laboratories to lower-containment facilities...
Editor's Pick Research Article | Novel Systems Biology TechniquesMPLEx: a Robust and Universal Protocol for Single-Sample Integrative Proteomic, Metabolomic, and Lipidomic AnalysesIn systems biology studies, the integration of multiple omics measurements (i.e., genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, and lipidomics) has been shown to provide a more complete and informative view of biological pathways. Thus, the prospect of extracting different types of molecules (e.g., DNAs, RNAs, proteins, and metabolites) and performing multiple omics measurements on single samples is very attractive, but such...
Editor's Pick Research Article | Novel Systems Biology TechniquesAn Integrated Metabolomic and Genomic Mining Workflow To Uncover the Biosynthetic Potential of BacteriaWe here combine chemical analysis and genomics to probe for new bioactive secondary metabolites based on their pattern of distribution within bacterial species. We demonstrate the usefulness of this combined approach in a group of marine Gram-negative bacteria closely related to Pseudoalteromonas luteoviolacea, which is a species known to produce a broad spectrum of...
Research Article | Novel Systems Biology TechniquesFrom Sample to Multi-Omics Conclusions in under 48 HoursPolymicrobial infections are difficult to diagnose due to the challenge in comprehensively cultivating the microbes present. Omics methods, such as 16S rRNA sequencing, metagenomics, and metabolomics, can provide a more complete picture of a microbial community and its metabolite production, without the biases and selectivity of microbial culture. However, these advanced methods have not been applied to clinical or industrial...
Editor's Pick Research Article | Novel Systems Biology TechniquesMetabolic Model-Based Integration of Microbiome Taxonomic and Metabolomic Profiles Elucidates Mechanistic Links between Ecological and Metabolic VariationStudies characterizing both the taxonomic composition and metabolic profile of various microbial communities are becoming increasingly common, yet new computational methods are needed to integrate and interpret these data in terms of known biological mechanisms. Here, we introduce an analytical framework to link species composition and metabolite measurements, using a simple model to predict the effects of community ecology on...
Editor's Pick Research Article | Novel Systems Biology TechniquesADAGE-Based Integration of Publicly Available Pseudomonas aeruginosa Gene Expression Data with Denoising Autoencoders Illuminates Microbe-Host InteractionsThe quantity and breadth of genome-scale data sets that examine RNA expression in diverse bacterial and eukaryotic species are increasing more rapidly than for curated knowledge. Our ADAGE method integrates such data without requiring gene function, gene pathway, or experiment labeling, making practical its application to any large gene expression compendium. We built a ...
Methods and Protocols | Novel Systems Biology TechniquesImproved Bacterial 16S rRNA Gene (V4 and V4-5) and Fungal Internal Transcribed Spacer Marker Gene Primers for Microbial Community SurveysWe continue to uncover a wealth of information connecting microbes in important ways to human and environmental ecology. As our scientific knowledge and technical abilities improve, the tools used for microbiome surveys can be modified to improve the accuracy of our techniques, ensuring that we can continue to identify groundbreaking connections between microbes and the ecosystems they populate, from ice caps to the human body. It is...
Methods and Protocols | Novel Systems Biology Techniquescual-id: Globally Unique, Correctable, and Human-Friendly Sample Identifiers for Comparative Omics StudiesThe adoption of identifiers that are globally unique, correctable, and easily handwritten or manually entered into a computer will be a major step forward for sample tracking in comparative omics studies. As the fields transition to more-centralized sample management, for example, across labs within an institution, across projects funded under a common program, or in systems designed to facilitate meta- and/or integrated analysis,...