The composition and function of the human gut microbiome are linked to health and disease. Understanding Molecular mechanisms of pathogenesis from gut microbiota perturbation, is necessary to identify novel targets for therapeutic development. This requires comprehensive profiling of microbial communities across populations, typically done via 16S amplicon sequencing. While this method detects broad microbial targets, its resolution is limited to distinguishing microbes at the family/genus level. To fill this gap, Reference-based Exact Mapping (RExMap) was developed of microbial amplicon variants that enables mapping of microbial species from standard 16S sequencing data. RExMap provides a complementary approach to traditional taxonomic assignments, with the goal of linking sequences from biological samples to exactly matching isolate strains and providing a way towards experimental validation. This also enables re-analysis of existing 16S data of existing human gut microbiome which across 29,349 individuals from ten studies covering sixteen regions of the world revealed a detailed landscape of the human gut microbiome, encompassing tens of thousands of unique microbes.
Link to the article: bit.ly/3nsby3W
Published On: /05/2023
