TY - JOUR T1 - Total RNA Sequencing reveals microbial communities in human blood and disease specific effects JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/057570 SP - 057570 AU - Serghei Mangul AU - Loes M Olde Loohuis AU - Anil P Ori AU - Guillaume Jospin AU - David Koslicki AU - Harry Taegyun Yang AU - Timothy Wu AU - Marco P Boks AU - Catherine Lomen-Hoerth AU - Wiedau-Pazos Martina AU - Rita M Cantor AU - Willem M de Vos AU - René S Kahn AU - Eleazar Eskin AU - Roel A Ophoff Y1 - 2016/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/06/07/057570.abstract N2 - An increasing body of evidence suggests an important role of the human microbiome in health and disease. We propose a ‘lost and found’ pipeline, which examines high quality unmapped sequence reads for microbial taxonomic classification. Using this pipeline, we are able to detect bacterial and archaeal phyla in blood using RNA sequencing (RNA-Seq) data. Careful analyses, including the use of positive and negative control datasets, suggest that these detected phyla represent true microbial communities in whole blood and are not due to contaminants. We applied our pipeline to study the composition of microbial communities present in blood across 192 individuals from four subject groups: schizophrenia (n=48), amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (n=47), bipolar disorder (n=48) and healthy controls (n=49). We observe a significantly increased microbial diversity in schizophrenia compared to the three other groups and replicate this finding in an independent schizophrenia case-control study. Our results demonstrate the potential use of total RNA to study microbes that inhabit the human body. ER -