Project description:The great tit is a widely studied passerine bird species in ecology that, in the past decades, has provided important insights into speciation, phenology, behavior and microevolution. After completion of the great tit genome sequence, a customized high density 650k SNP array was developed enabling more detailed genomic studies in this species.
Project description:On going efforts are directed at understanding the mutualism between the gut microbiota and the host in breast-fed versus formula-fed infants. Due to the lack of tissue biopsies, no investigators have performed a global transcriptional (gene expression) analysis of the developing human intestine in healthy infants. As a result, the crosstalk between the microbiome and the host transcriptome in the developing mucosal-commensal environment has not been determined. In this study, we examined the host intestinal mRNA gene expression and microbial DNA profiles in full term 3 month-old infants exclusively formula fed (FF) (n=6) or breast fed (BF) (n=6) from birth to 3 months. Host mRNA microarray measurements were performed using isolated intact sloughed epithelial cells in stool samples collected at 3 months. Microbial composition from the same stool samples was assessed by metagenomic pyrosequencing. Both the host mRNA expression and bacterial microbiome phylogenetic profiles provided strong feature sets that clearly classified the two groups of babies (FF and BF). To determine the relationship between host epithelial cell gene expression and the bacterial colony profiles, the host transcriptome and functionally profiled microbiome data were analyzed in a multivariate manner. From a functional perspective, analysis of the gut microbiota's metagenome revealed that characteristics associated with virulence differed between the FF and BF babies. Using canonical correlation analysis, evidence of multivariate structure relating eleven host immunity / mucosal defense-related genes and microbiome virulence characteristics was observed. These results, for the first time, provide insight into the integrated responses of the host and microbiome to dietary substrates in the early neonatal period. Our data suggest that systems biology and computational modeling approaches that integrate “-omic” information from the host and the microbiome can identify important mechanistic pathways of intestinal development affecting the gut microbiome in the first few months of life. KEYWORDS: infant, breast-feeding, infant formula, exfoliated cells, transcriptome, metagenome, multivariate analysis, canonical correlation analysis 12 samples, 2 groups
Project description:In a prior report, we observed two distinct lung microbiomes in healthy subjects that we termed â??pneumotypesâ??: pneumotypeSPT, characterized by high bacterial load and supraglottic predominant taxa (SPT) such as the anaerobes Prevotella and Veillonella; and pneumotypeBPT, with low bacterial burden and background predominant taxa (BPT) found in the saline lavage and bronchoscope. Here, we determined the prevalence of these two contrasting lung microbiome types, in a multi-center study of healthy subjects. We confirmed that a lower airway microbiome enriched with upper airway microbes (pneumotypeSPT) was present in ~45% of healthy individuals. Cross-sectional Multicenter cohort. BAL of 49 healthy subjects from three cohort had their lower airway microbiome assessed by 16S rDNA sequencing and microbial gene content (metagenome) was computationally inferred from taxonomic assignments. The amplicons from total 100 samples are barcoded; the barcode and other clinical characteristics (e.g. inflammatory biomarkers and metabolome data) for each sample are provided in the 'Pneumotype.sep.Map.A1.txt' file.