When is microbial strain sharing evidence for transmission?
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Debray R
PROVIDER: S-EPMC11275843 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Jul
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Publications
Shared environments complicate the use of strain-resolved metagenomics to infer microbiome transmission.
Debray Reena R Dickson Carly C CC Webb Shasta E SE Archie Elizabeth A EA Tung Jenny J
bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology 20241115
In humans and other social animals, social partners have more similar microbiomes than expected by chance, suggesting that social contact transfers microorganisms. Yet, social microbiome transmission can be difficult to identify based on compositional data alone. To overcome this challenge, recent studies have used information about microbial strain sharing (i.e., the shared presence of highly similar microbial sequences) to infer transmission. However, the degree to which strain sharing is infl ...[more]
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