Project description:BackgroundMicrobial communities (microbiota) influence human and animal disease and immunity, geochemical nutrient cycling and plant productivity. Specific groups, including bacteria, archaea, eukaryotes or fungi, are amplified by PCR to assess the relative abundance of sub-groups (e.g. genera). However, neither the absolute abundance of sub-groups is revealed, nor can different amplicon families (i.e. OTUs derived from a specific pair of PCR primers such as bacterial 16S, eukaryotic 18S or fungi ITS) be compared. This prevents determination of the absolute abundance of a particular group and domain-level shifts in microbiota abundance can remain undetected.ResultsWe have developed absolute quantitation of amplicon families using synthetic chimeric DNA spikes. Synthetic spikes were added directly to environmental samples, co-isolated and PCR-amplified, allowing calculation of the absolute abundance of amplicon families (e.g. prokaryotic 16S, eukaryotic 18S and fungal ITS per unit mass of sample).ConclusionsSpikes can be adapted to any amplicon-specific group including rhizobia from soils, Firmicutes and Bifidobacteria from human gut or Enterobacteriaceae from food samples. Crucially, using highly complex soil samples, we show that the absolute abundance of specific groups can remain steady or increase, even when their relative abundance decreases. Thus, without absolute quantitation, the underlying pathology, physiology and ecology of microbial groups may be masked by their relative abundance.
Project description:The current coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is caused by several variants of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 virus (SARS-CoV-2). With the roll-out of vaccines and development of new therapeutics that may be targeted to distinct viral molecules, there is a need to screen populations for viral antigen-specific SARS-CoV-2 antibodies. Here, we report a rapid, multiplexed, electrochemical (EC) device with on-chip control that enables detection of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in less than 10 min using 1.5 μL of a patient sample. The EC biosensor demonstrated 100% sensitivity and specificity, and an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 1, when evaluated using 93 clinical samples, including plasma and dried blood spot samples from 54 SARS-CoV-2 positive and 39 negative patients. This EC biosensor platform enables simple, cost-effective, sensitive, and rapid detection of anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in complex clinical samples, which is convenient for evaluating humoral-responses to vaccination or infection in population-wide testing, including applications in point-of-care settings. We also demonstrate the feasibility of using dried blood spot samples that can be collected locally and transported to distant clinical laboratories at ambient temperature for detection of anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies which may be utilized for serological surveillance and demonstrate the utility of remote sampling.
Project description:Digital polymerase chain reaction (PCR) has developed rapidly since it was first reported in the 1990s. However, pretreatments are often required during preparation for digital PCR, which can increase operation error. The single-plex amplification of both the target and reference genes may cause uncertainties due to the different reaction volumes and the matrix effect. In the current study, a quantitative detection system based on the pretreatment-free duplex chamber digital PCR was developed. The dynamic range, limit of quantitation (LOQ), sensitivity and specificity were evaluated taking the GA21 event as the experimental object. Moreover, to determine the factors that may influence the stability of the duplex system, we evaluated whether the pretreatments, the primary and secondary structures of the probes and the SNP effect influence the detection. The results showed that the LOQ was 0.5% and the sensitivity was 0.1%. We also found that genome digestion and single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) sites affect the detection results, whereas the unspecific hybridization within different probes had little side effect. This indicated that the detection system was suited for both chamber-based and droplet-based digital PCR. In conclusion, we have provided a simple and flexible way of achieving absolute quantitation for genetically modified organism (GMO) genome samples using commercial digital PCR detection systems.
Project description:Anellovirus (AV) is a ubiquitous and diverse virus in the human population. An individual can be infected with multiple AV genera and species that form a heterogeneous repertoire, called the anellome. Due to its exceptional genetic diversity, efficient evaluation of anellome complexity remains a methodological challenge. In the current study, AV genome was first enriched from patient serum samples through two-phase rolling circle amplification. Following Illumina sequencing, anellome was analyzed with an advanced bioinformatics pipeline, including read extraction at three similarity levels, de novo assembly, species assignment, and determination of relative abundance among AV variants. The method was validated in the mock sample and then applied to 21 hepatitis C virus (HCV) patients with and without hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Overall, there was a large variance regarding AV richness, ranging from 2 to 51 AV species. In contrast to HCV patients without HCC, HCC incidence was associated with reduced richness (12.6 ± 14.4 vs. 35.4 ± 13.6, p = 0.001) and Shannon entropy (0.4 ± 0.34 vs. 0.61 ± 0.12, p = 0.095) at the AV species level. Interestingly, AV genus beta and gamma expanded in the anellome in 7 of 10 HCC patients. These observations shed light on the potential association between anellome and HCC incidence in patients with chronic HCV infection. The method presented here represents a valuable tool to investigate the role of anellome in human health and disease.
Project description:Bioluminescence emitted from a luciferase-catalyzed oxidation of luciferin has been broadly utilized to report on biological events, predominantly through relative changes in the light output. Recent advances in protein engineering and synthetic chemistry have yielded bioluminescent systems with markedly improved brightness and bioavailability. These developments have enabled not only the detection of biological events at far lower expression levels but also new opportunities utilizing bioluminescence to power photochemistry in cells. Regardless of the application, bioluminescence analyses have leaned heavily on the use of luminometers to measure the light output of a system. Current luminometers report the light output of a sample in relative units, limiting the ability to compare data between instruments and preventing the absolute power of a bioluminescent system from being quantified. Luminescent solution calibrants comprising luciferases and their cognate luciferins that have been characterized for absolute light output would enable calibration of any given luminometer for absolute photon counting. To this end, we have built a custom light detection apparatus and used it alongside wavelength-matched LED light sources emitting at 450 and 561 nm to characterize the absolute power of a series of NanoLuc and firefly luciferase solutions, respectively. This approach revealed that these two common luciferases produce 3.72 × 10-18 and 7.25 × 10-20 watts/molecule, respectively. Components of these luminescent solution calibrants are commercially available and produce stable bioluminescent signals over 2-5 min, enabling any luminometer to be calibrated for power measurements of bioluminescence emitted by these two luciferases in units of watts or photons per second.
Project description:An absolute quantitation method for measuring free human milk oligosaccharides (HMOs) in milk samples was developed using multiple reaction monitoring (MRM). To obtain the best sensitivity, the instrument conditions were optimized to reduce the source and postsource fragmentation prior to the quadrupole transmission. Fragmentation spectra of HMOs using collision-induced dissociation were studied to obtain the best characteristic fragments. At least two MRM transitions were used to quantify and identify each structure in the same run. The fragment ions corresponded to the production of singly charged mono-, di-, and trisaccharide fragments. The sensitivity and accuracy of the quantitation using MRM were determined, with the detection limit in the femtomole level and the calibration range spanning over 5 orders of magnitude. Seven commercial HMO standards were used to create calibration curves and were used to determine a universal response for all HMOs. The universal response factor was used to estimate absolute amounts of other structures and the total oligosaccharide content in milk. The quantitation method was applied to 20 human milk samples to determine the variations in HMO concentrations from women classified as secretors and nonsecretors, a phenotype that can be identified by the concentration of 2'-fucosylation in their milk.
Project description:BackgroundThe quantitation of human milk oligosaccharides (HMOs) is challenging because of the structural complexity and lack of standards.ObjectiveThe objective of our study was to rapidly measure the absolute concentrations of HMOs in milk using LC-mass spectrometry (MS) and to determine the phenotypic secretor status of the mothers.MethodsThis quantitative method for measuring HMO concentration was developed by using ultraperformance LC multiple reaction monitoring MS. It was validated and applied to milk samples from Malawi (88 individuals; 88 samples from postnatal month 6) and the United States (Davis, California; 45 individuals, mean age: 32 y; 103 samples collected on postnatal days 10, 26, 71, or 120, repeated measures included). The concentrations of α(1,2)-fucosylated HMOs were used to determine the mothers' phenotypic secretor status with high sensitivity and specificity. We used Friedman's test and Wilcoxon's signed rank test to evaluate the change in HMO concentration during the course of lactation, and Student's t test was used to compare secretors and nonsecretors.ResultsA decrease (P < 0.05) in HMO concentration was observed during the course of lactation for the US mothers, corresponding to 19.3 ± 2.9 g/L for milk collected on postnatal day 10, decreasing to 8.53 ± 1.18 g/L on day 120 (repeated measures; n = 14). On postnatal day 180, the total concentration of HMOs in Malawi milk samples from secretors (6.46 ± 1.74 mg/mL) was higher (P < 0.05) than that in samples from nonsecretors (5.25 ± 2.55 mg/mL ). The same trend was observed for fucosylated species; the concentration was higher in Malawi milk samples from secretors (4.91 ± 1.22 mg/mL) than from nonsecretors (3.42 ± 2.27 mg/mL) (P < 0.05).ConclusionsHMOs significantly decrease during the course of lactation. Secretor milk contains higher concentrations of total and fucosylated HMOs than does nonsecretor milk. These HMO concentrations can be correlated to the health of breastfed infants in order to investigate the protective effects of milk components. The trials were registered at clinicaltrials.gov as NCT01817127 and NCT00524446.
Project description:Broad-based, targeted metabolite profiling using mass spectrometry (MS) has become a major platform used in the field of metabolomics for a variety of applications. However, quantitative MS analysis is challenging owing to numerous factors including (1) the need for, ideally, isotope-labeled internal standards for each metabolite, (2) the fact that such standards may be unavailable or prohibitively costly, (3) the need to maintain the standards' concentrations close to those of the target metabolites, and (4) the alternative use of time-consuming calibration curves for each target metabolite. Here, we introduce a new method in which metabolites from a single serum specimen are quantified on the basis of a recently developed NMR method [ Nagana Gowda et al. Anal. Chem. 2015 , 87 , 706 ] and then used as references for absolute metabolite quantitation using MS. The MS concentrations of 30 metabolites thus derived for test serum samples exhibited excellent correlations with the NMR ones (R2 > 0.99) with a median CV of 3.2%. This NMR-guided-MS quantitation approach is simple and easy to implement and offers new avenues for the routine quantification of blood metabolites using MS. The demonstration that NMR and MS data can be compared and correlated when using identical sample preparations allows improved opportunities to exploit their combined strengths for biomarker discovery and unknown-metabolite identification. Intriguingly, however, metabolites including glutamine, pyroglutamic acid, glucose, and sarcosine correlated poorly with NMR data because of stability issues in their MS analyses or weak or overlapping signals. Such information is potentially important for improving biomarker discovery and biological interpretations. Further, the new quantitation method demonstrated here for human blood serum can in principle be extended to a variety of biological mixtures.
Project description:Studies aimed toward glycan biomarker discovery have focused on glycan characterization by the global profiling of released glycans. Site-specific glycosylation analysis is less developed but may provide new types of biomarkers with higher sensitivity and specificity. Quantitation of peptide-conjugated glycans directly facilitates the differential analysis of distinct glycoforms associated with specific proteins at distinct sites. We have developed a method using MRM to monitor protein glycosylation normalized to absolute protein concentrations to examine quantitative changes in glycosylation at a site-specific level. This new approach provides information regarding both the absolute amount of protein and the site-specific glycosylation profile and will thus be useful to determine if altered glycosylation profiles in serum/plasma are due to a change in protein glycosylation or a change in protein concentration. The remarkable sensitivity and selectivity of MRM enable the detection of low abundance IgG glycopeptides, even when IgG was digested directly in serum with no cleanup prior to the liquid chromatography. Our results show a low limit of detection of 60 amol and a wide dynamic range of 3 orders magnitude for IgG protein quantitation. The results show that IgG glycopeptides can be analyzed directly from serum (without enrichment) and yield more accurate abundances when normalized to the protein content. This report represents the most comprehensive study so far of the use of multiple reaction monitoring for the quantitation of glycoproteins and their glycosylation patterns in biofluids.
Project description:Bacterial biofilms are the most prevalent mode of bacterial growth in nature. Adhesive and viscoelastic properties of bacteria play important roles at different stages of biofilm development. Following irreversible attachment of bacterial cells onto a surface, a biofilm can grow in which its matrix viscoelasticity helps to maintain structural integrity, determine stress resistance, and control ease of dispersion. In this study, a novel application of force spectroscopy was developed to characterize the surface adhesion and viscoelasticity of bacterial cells in biofilms. By performing microbead force spectroscopy with a closed-loop atomic force microscope, we accurately quantified these properties over a defined contact area. Using the model gram-negative bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa, we observed that the adhesive and viscoelastic properties of an isogenic lipopolysaccharide mutant wapR biofilm were significantly different from those measured for the wild-type strain PAO1 biofilm. Moreover, biofilm maturation in either strain also led to prominent changes in adhesion and viscoelasticity. To minimize variability in force measurements resulting from experimental parameter changes, we developed standardized conditions for microbead force spectroscopy to enable meaningful comparison of data obtained in different experiments. Force plots measured under standard conditions showed that the adhesive pressures of PAO1 and wapR early biofilms were 34 +/- 15 Pa and 332 +/- 47 Pa, respectively, whereas those of PAO1 and wapR mature biofilms were 19 +/- 7 Pa and 80 +/- 22 Pa, respectively. Fitting of creep data to a Voigt Standard Linear Solid viscoelasticity model revealed that the instantaneous and delayed elastic moduli in P. aeruginosa were drastically reduced by lipopolysaccharide deficiency and biofilm maturation, whereas viscosity was decreased only for biofilm maturation. In conclusion, we have introduced a direct biophysical method for simultaneously quantifying adhesion and viscoelasticity in bacterial biofilms under native conditions. This method could prove valuable for elucidating the contribution of genetic backgrounds, growth conditions, and environmental stresses to microbial community physiology.