Journal Club Topic of Discussion: MetaOmics

Computational meta'omics for microbial community studies

Abstract

Complex microbial communities are an integral part of the Earth's ecosystem and of our bodies in health and disease. In the last two decades, culture‐independent approaches have provided new insights into their structure and function, with the exponentially decreasing cost of high‐throughput sequencing resulting in broadly available tools for microbial surveys. However, the field remains far from reaching a technological plateau, as both computational techniques and nucleotide sequencing platforms for microbial genomic and transcriptional content continue to improve. Current microbiome analyses are thus starting to adopt multiple and complementary meta'omic approaches, leading to unprecedented opportunities to comprehensively and accurately characterize microbial communities and their interactions with their environments and hosts. This diversity of available assays, analysis methods, and public data is in turn beginning to enable microbiome‐based predictive and modeling tools. We thus review here the technological and computational meta'omics approaches that are already available, those that are under active development, their success in biological discovery, and several outstanding challenges.

https://www.embopress.org/doi/full/10.1038/msb.2013.22

Coupling Targeted and Untargeted Mass Spectrometry for Metabolome-Microbiome-Wide Association Studies of Human Fecal Samples

Abstract

Increasing appreciation of the gut microbiome’s role in health motivates understanding the molecular composition of human feces. To analyze such complex samples, we developed a platform coupling targeted and untargeted metabolomics. The approach is facilitated through split flow from one UPLC, joint timing triggered by contact closure relays, and a script to retrieve the data. It is designed to detect specific metabolites of interest with high sensitivity, allows for correction of targeted information, enables better quantitation thus providing an advanced analytical tool for exploratory studies. Procrustes analysis revealed that untargeted approach provides a better correlation to microbiome data, associating specific metabolites with microbes that produce or process them. With the subset of over one hundred human fecal samples from the American Gut project, the implementation of the described coupled workflow revealed that targeted analysis using combination of single transition per compound with retention time misidentifies 30% of the targeted data and could lead to incorrect interpretations. At the same time, the targeted analysis extends detection limits and dynamic range, depending on the compounds, by orders of magnitude. A software application has been developed as a part of the workflow to allows for quantitative assessments based on calibration curves. Using this approach, we detect expected microbially modified molecules such as secondary bile acids and unexpected microbial molecules including Pseudomonas-associated quinolones and rhamnolipids in feces, setting the stage for metabolome-microbiome-wide association studies (MMWAS).

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.analchem.7b01381#