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A team of microbiologists has isolated 105 completely new species of bacteria from the intestines of healthy people.
Forster et al created the most comprehensive collection of human intestinal bacteria to date.
About 2% of a person's body weight is due to a bacterium and the gut microbiome is a major bacterial site and an essential contributor to human health.
The imbalances in our intestinal microbiome can contribute to complex diseases and conditions such as inflammatory bowel disease, irritable bowel syndrome, allergies and obesity.
However, as many species of intestinal bacteria are extremely difficult to grow in the laboratory, our knowledge is extremely deficient.
To form a complete collection of bacterial isolates from the human gastrointestinal tract, Dr. Samuel Forster of the Wellcome Sanger Institute and the Hudson Institute of Medical Research and colleagues studied stool samples from 20 adults in the United Kingdom and from Canada.
They grew up successfully and the DNA sequenced 737 individual bacterial strains from the samples.
The badysis of these isolates revealed 273 distinct bacterial species, including 173 that had never been sequenced before.
This collection includes 31 families of phyla Actinobacteria (53 genomes, 16 species), Bacteroidetes (143 genomes, 40 species), Firmicutes (496 genomes, 203 species) and Proteobacteria (45 genomes, 14 species).
Of these, 105 species had never even been isolated before.
"This study led to the creation of the largest and most comprehensive public database on intestinal bacteria badociated with human health," said Dr. Forster.
"The intestinal microbiome plays a major role in health and disease. This important resource will fundamentally change the way researchers study the microbiome. "
The new crop collection and reference genomes will make it easier and more cost-effective for researchers to identify bacteria in the community and to research their role in the development of the disease.
"For researchers who are trying to determine which species of bacteria are present in a person's microbiome, the database of reference genomes derived from pure isolates of intestinal bacteria is crucial," said the co – author of the study, Dr. Rob Finn, scientist at the European Institute of Bioinformatics of EMBL. .
"Then, if they want to test a hypothesis, for example that a given species is enriched by a given disease, they can get the isolate from the collection and do physical lab tests if that species seems to be important."
"This collection of individual bacteria cultures will change the game for basic and translational research on the microbiome," said co-lead author of the study, Dr. Trevor Lawley, a researcher at the Wellcome Sanger Institute.
The results appear in the log Nature Biotechnology.
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Samuel C. Forster et al. 2019. An intestinal bacterial genome and a collection of cultures for improved metagenomic badyzes. Nature Biotechnology 37: 186-192; doi: 10.1038 / s41587-018-0009-7
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