RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Humans are colonized by many uncharacterized and highly divergent microbes
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 113746
DO 10.1101/113746
A1 Mark Kowarsky
A1 Joan Camunas
A1 Michael Kertesz
A1 Vlaminck Iwijn De
A1 Winston Koh
A1 Wenying Pan
A1 Lance Martin
A1 Norma Neff
A1 Jennifer Okamoto
A1 Ron Wong
A1 Sandhya Kharbanda
A1 Yasser El-Sayed
A1 Yair Blumenfeld
A1 David K. Stevenson
A1 Gary Shaw
A1 Nathan D. Wolfe
A1 Stephen R. Quake
YR 2017
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/03/04/113746.abstract
AB Blood circulates throughout the entire body and contains molecules drawn from virtually every tissue, including the microbes and viruses which colonize the body. Through massive shotgun sequencing of circulating cell-free DNA from the blood, we identified hundreds of new bacteria and viruses which represent previously unidentified members of the human microbiome. Analysing cumulative sequence data from 1,351 blood samples collected from 188 patients enabled us to assemble 7,190 contiguous regions (contigs) larger than 1 kbp, of which 3,761 are novel with little or no sequence homology in any existing databases. The vast majority of these novel contigs possess coding sequences, and we have validated their existence both by finding their presence in independent experiments and by performing direct PCR amplification. When their nearest neighbors are located in the tree of life, many of the organisms represent entirely novel taxa, showing that microbial diversity within the human body is substantially broader than previously appreciated.