Personalized microbiome dynamics – Cytometric fingerprints for routine diagnostics

Publication date: Available online 8 July 2017 Source:Molecular Aspects of Medicine Author(s): Christin Koch, Susann Müller Microbiomes convoy human life in countless ways. They are an essential part of the human body and interact with its host in countless ways. Currently, extensive microbiome analyses assessing the microbiomes' composition and functions based on sequencing information are still far away from being routine analyses due to the complexity of applied techniques and data analysis, their time demand as well as high costs. With the growing demand for on-time community assessment and monitoring of its dynamic behavior with high resolution, alternative high-throughput methods such as microbial community flow cytometry come into focus. Our flow cytometric approach provides single-cell based high-dimensional data by using only three parameters but for every cell in a system which is enough to characterize whole communities’ attributes with high acuity over time. To interpret such complex cytometric time-series data, novel concepts are required. We provide a workflow which is applicable for easy-to-use handling and measurement of microbiomes. Drawing inspiration from macro-ecology, in which a rich set of concepts has been developed for describing population dynamics, we interpret huge sets of community single cell data in an intuitive and actionable way using a series of bioinformatics tools which we either developed or adapted from sequence based evaluation app...
Source: Molecular Aspects of Medicine - Category: Molecular Biology Source Type: research