Processing faecal samples: a step forward for standards in microbial community analysis.

ABSTRACT:

Background

The microbial community analysis of stools requires optimised and standardised protocols for their collection, homogenisation, microbial disruption and nucleic acid extraction. Here we examined whether different layers of the stool are equally representative of the microbiome. We also studied the effect of stool water content, which typically increases in diarrhoeic samples, and of a microbial disruption method on DNA integrity and, therefore, on providing an unbiased microbial composition analysis.

Results

We collected faecal samples from healthy subjects and performed microbial composition analysis by pyrosequencing the V4 region of the 16S rRNA gene. To examine the effect of stool structure, we compared the inner and outer layers of the samples (N = 8). Both la

SUBMITTER: Santiago A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4021188 | biostudies-literature | 2014 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature