Lactobacillus rhamnosus GG-supplemented formula expands butyrate-producing bacterial strains in food allergic infants.

Dietary intervention with extensively hydrolyzed casein formula supplemented with Lactobacillus rhamnosus GG (EHCF+LGG) accelerates tolerance acquisition in infants with cow's milk allergy (CMA). We examined whether this effect is attributable, at least in part, to an influence on the gut microbiota. Fecal samples from healthy controls (n=20) and from CMA infants (n=19) before and after treatment with EHCF with (n=12) and without (n=7) supplementation with LGG were compared by 16S rRNA-based operational taxonomic unit clustering and oligotyping. Differential feature selection and generalized linear model fitting revealed that the CMA infants have a diverse gut microbial community structure dominated by Lachnospiraceae (20.5±9.7%) and Ruminococcaceae (16.2±9.1%). Blautia, Roseburia and Coprococcus were significantly enriched following treatment with EHCF and LGG, but only one genus, Oscillospira, was significantly different between infants that became tolerant and those that remained allergic. However, most tolerant infants showed a significant increase in fecal butyrate levels, and those taxa that were significantly enriched in these samples, Blautia and Roseburia, exhibited specific strain-level demarcations between tolerant and allergic infants. Our data suggest that EHCF+LGG promotes tolerance in infants with CMA, in part, by influencing the strain-level bacterial community structure of the infant gut

Human oral viruses are personal, persistent and gender-consistent.

Viruses are the most abundant members of the human oral microbiome, yet relatively little is known about their biodiversity in humans. To improve our understanding of the DNA viruses that inhabit the human oral cavity, we examined saliva from a cohort of eight unrelated subjects over a 60-day period. Each subject was examined at 11 time points to characterize longitudinal differences in human oral viruses. Our primary goals were to determine whether oral viruses were specific to individuals and whether viral genotypes persisted over time. We found a subset of homologous viral genotypes across all subjects and time points studied, suggesting that certain genotypes may be ubiquitous among healthy human subjects. We also found significant associations between viral genotypes and individual subjects, indicating that viruses are a highly personalized feature of the healthy human oral microbiome. Many of these oral viruses were not transient members of the oral ecosystem, as demonstrated by the persistence of certain viruses throughout the entire 60-day study period. As has previously been demonstrated for bacteria and fungi, membership in the oral viral community was significantly associated with the sex of each subject. Similar characteristics of personalized, sex-specific microflora could not be identified for oral bacterial communities based on 16S rRNA. Our findings that many viruses are stable and individual-specific members of the oral ecosystem suggest that viruses have an important role in the human oral ecosystem

Streaming histogram sketching for rapid microbiome analytics

Background: The growth in publically available microbiome data in recent years has yielded an invaluable resource for genomic research, allowing for the design of new studies, augmentation of novel datasets and reanalysis of published works. This vast amount of microbiome data, as well as the widespread proliferation of microbiome research and the looming era of clinical metagenomics, means there is an urgent need to develop analytics that can process huge amounts of data in a short amount of time. To address this need, we propose a new method for the compact representation of microbiome sequencing data using similarity-preserving sketches of streaming k-mer spectra. These sketches allow for dissimilarity estimation, rapid microbiome catalogue searching and classification of microbiome samples in near real time. Results: We apply streaming histogram sketching to microbiome samples as a form of dimensionality reduction, creating a compressed ‘histosketch’ that can efficiently represent microbiome k-mer spectra. Using public microbiome datasets, we show that histosketches can be clustered by sample type using the pairwise Jaccard similarity estimation, consequently allowing for rapid microbiome similarity searches via a locality sensitive hashing indexing scheme. Furthermore, we use a ‘real life’ example to show that histosketches can train machine learning classifiers to accurately label microbiome samples. Specifically, using a collection of 108 novel microbiome samples from a cohort of premature neonates, we trained and tested a random forest classifier that could accurately predict whether the neonate had received antibiotic treatment (97% accuracy, 96% precision) and could subsequently be used to classify microbiome data streams in less than 3 s. Conclusions: Our method offers a new approach to rapidly process microbiome data streams, allowing samples to be rapidly clustered, indexed and classified. We also provide our implementation, Histosketching Using Little K-mers (HULK), which can histosketch a typical 2 GB microbiome in 50 s on a standard laptop using four cores, with the sketch occupying 3000 bytes of disk space

“Microbiota, symbiosis and individuality summer school” meeting report

How does microbiota research impact our understanding of biological individuality? We summarize the interdisciplinary summer school on “Microbiota, symbiosis and individuality: conceptual and philosophical issues” (July 2019), which was supported by a European Research Council starting grant project “Immunity, DEvelopment, and the Microbiota” (IDEM). The summer school centered around interdisciplinary group work on four facets of microbiota research: holobionts, individuality, causation, and human health. The conceptual discussion of cutting-edge empirical research provided new insights into microbiota and highlights the value of incorporating into meetings experts from other disciplines, such as philosophy and history of science