enteric mirobial consortium.doc

PLoS One.?2011;6(12):e27858. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0027858. Epub 2011 Dec 8. Beyond bacteria: a study of the enteric microbial consortium in extremely low birth weight infants. LaTuga MS1,?Ellis JC,?Cotton CM,?Goldberg RN,?Wynn JL,?Jackson RB,?Seed PC. Author information Abstract Extremely low birth weight (ELBW) infants have high morbidity and mortality, frequently due to invasive infections from bacteria, fungi, and viruses. The microbial communities present in the gastrointestinal tracts of?preterm?infants may serve as a reservoir for invasive organisms and remain poorly characterized. We used deep pyrosequencing to examine the?gut-associated microbiome of 11 ELBW infants in the first postnatal month, with a first time determination of the eukaryote?microbiota?such as fungi and nematodes, including bacteria and viruses that have not been previously described. Among the fungi observed, Candida sp. and Clavispora sp. dominated the sequences, but a range of environmental molds were also observed. Surprisingly, seventy-one percent of the infant fecal samples tested contained ribosomal sequences corresponding to the parasitic organism Trichinella. Ribosomal DNA sequences for the roundworm symbiont Xenorhabdus accompanied these sequences in the infant with the greatest proportion of Trichinella sequences. When examining ribosomal DNA sequences in aggregate, Enterobacteriales, Pseudomonas, Staphylococcus, and Enterococcus were the most abundant bacterial taxa in a low diversity bacterial community (mean Shannon-Weaver Index of 1.02 ± 0.69), with relatively little change within individual infants through time. To supplement the ribosomal sequence data, shotgun sequencing was performed on DNA from multiple displacement amplification (MDA) of total fecal genomic DNA from two infants. In addition to the organisms mentioned previously, the metagenome also revealed sequences for gram positive and gram negative bacteriophages, as well as human adenovirus C. Together, these