Trillions
of tiny microbes and bacteria live in your gut, each with their own set of
genes. These gut microbes can have both beneficial and harmful effects on your
health, from protecting you against inflammation to causing life-threatening
infections. To keep out pathogens yet encourage the growth of beneficial
microbes, scientists have been trying to find ways to target specific microbial
genes.
A
new study published in the scientific journal PLOS Computational Biology led by
Patrick Bradley, a postdoctoral scholar in the Pollard lab, found a new
approach to identify the genes that may be important to help microbes live
successfully in the human gut.
New
computational methods and DNA sequencing provide a solution to determine which
microbes are usually present in a person's gut, and what genes are in the
microbes' genomes. However, the researchers at Gladstone showed that just
looking at the genes shared by gut microbes, without accounting for the
microbes' common ancestry, can lead to many false discoveries.
See:
Patrick H. Bradley, Stephen Nayfach, Katherine S. Pollard. Phylogeny-corrected
identification of microbial gene families relevant to human gut colonization. PLOS
Computational Biology, 2018; 14 (8): e1006242 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1006242
Posted by Dr. Tim Sandle,
Pharmaceutical Microbiology