Two papers: Monitoring bacterial species in the gut microbiota

A team of researchers led by Dr.

Pollard, the lead author of the two studies, said: "I think researchers have missed a lot of information because they only focus on the types of microorganisms

In a study published in the journal Nature Biotechnology, researchers from the Gladstone Institute and Dr.

The team has developed a new calculation method to analyze the bacterial strains present in the microbiome sample, and believes that this new method will enable researchers to conduct a more precise analysis of the microbiome

"Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in metagenomics are used to quantify population structure, track strains, and determine the genetic determinants of microbial phenotypes," the researchers wrote

The second study was published in the journal Genome Research, entitled "Longitudinal-strand read sequencing reveals the ecological and evolutionary responses of the human gut microbiota during antibiotic treatment

The researchers wrote: “Here, we have performed a high-time and genetic resolution characterization of the gut microbiota of a single individual during health, disease, antibiotic treatment, and recovery

The researchers worked with the laboratories of Dr.

High-performance computing power and cloud storage are required to identify genetic differences in microbiome samples

They analyzed more than 100,000 publicly available genomes of about 900 bacteria commonly found in the human intestine

Nafach said: "With the proliferation of newly sequenced genomes in the gut microbiota and other environments, we can now create detailed genetic maps for thousands of bacteria

Pollard said: "Our new algorithm opens the door for everyone to achieve this level of resolution on a personal computer

Pollard and her colleagues also analyzed how bacterial strains, not just species, change over time with antibiotics

Goode, assistant professor of applied physics at Stanford University, said: “Our hypothesis is that many microorganisms will become less abundant after antibiotics and then recover, but the final microbiome will be more or less similar to the microbiome at the beginning.

Although the GT-Pro algorithm cannot be used in this research yet, Pollard said it will make similar research easier and cheaper in the future

"There is still a lot of work to be done to understand the functional consequences of different microbiota," Pollard said