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  • Review Article
  • Published:

A clinician's guide to microbiome analysis

Nature Reviews Gastroenterology & Hepatology volume 14, pages 585–595 (2017)Cite this article

Subjects

This article has been updated

Key Points

  • Complex communities of microorganisms live on and in the human body, and variations in the composition and function of these communities are increasingly linked to various conditions and diseases

  • Although it is not known if microbiome changes are causative or consequential in most pathophysiologies, they might provide biomarkers for disease detection or management

  • Microbiome analysis is likely to become a routine component of secondary health care and is emerging as a modifiable environmental risk factor in multifactorial diseases that could be targeted by novel therapeutics

  • Technology advancements are leading to a range of powerful methods for microbiome analysis becoming available and affordable for clinical studies

  • Judicious choice of sample type and sequencing platform are required to maximize the clinical utility of microbiome data

Abstract

Microbiome analysis involves determining the composition and function of a community of microorganisms in a particular location. For the gastroenterologist, this technology opens up a rapidly evolving set of challenges and opportunities for generating novel insights into the health of patients on the basis of microbiota characterizations from intestinal, hepatic or extraintestinal samples. Alterations in gut microbiota composition correlate with intestinal and extraintestinal disease and, although only a few mechanisms are known, the microbiota are still an attractive target for developing biomarkers for disease detection and management as well as potential therapeutic applications. In this Review, we summarize the major decision points confronting new entrants to the field or for those designing new projects in microbiome research. We provide recommendations based on current technology options and our experience of sequencing platform choices. We also offer perspectives on future applications of microbiome research, which we hope convey the promise of this technology for clinical applications.

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Figure 1: Flowchart of the major steps involved in bioinformatic analysis of the microbiome.
Figure 2: Sequence read assembly.

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Change history

  • 11 August 2017

    In the version of this Review initially published online, the article should have indicated that Marcus J. Claesson and Adam G. Clooney contributed equally to this work. The error has been corrected for the HTML, PDF and print versions of the article.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by Science Foundation Ireland through a Centre Award to the APC Microbiome Institute (SFI/12/RC/2273).

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  1. Marcus J. Claesson and Adam G. Clooney: These authors contributed equally to this work

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Microbiology, University College Cork, Western Road, Cork, T12 Y337, Ireland

    Marcus J. Claesson, Adam G. Clooney & Paul W. O'Toole

  2. APC Microbiome Institute, University College Cork, Western Road, Cork, T12 Y337, Ireland

    Marcus J. Claesson, Adam G. Clooney & Paul W. O'Toole

  3. Department of Biological Sciences, Cork Institute of Technology, Rossa Avenue, Bishopstown, Cork, T12 P928, Ireland

    Adam G. Clooney

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Glossary

Microbiome

The collection of microbial genomes at a given site.

Biomarkers

A measurable indicator of disease, pharmacological response or normal biological function.

Bioinformatics

The use of computer science, statistics and mathematics to analyse and interpret biological processes and molecular components.

Phylogenetics

Evolutionary relationships between organisms, genes or proteins.

Metagenome

The collective microbial genomes and genes in an environment or sample.

Shotgun sequencing

All extracted DNA is randomly sheered into desired fragment sizes for high-throughput sequencing, as opposed to targeting a specific marker gene.

Amplicon

A target gene or sequence that is amplified naturally or artificially.

Copy number

The number of copies of a particular section of DNA; some organisms have multiple copies of a targeted gene.

Taxa

A population of phylogenetically related organisms.

16S ribosomal RNA gene

A gene located in the 30S subunit of a prokaryotic ribosome, which contains nine variable regions that can be targeted for amplification and used for microbial taxonomic profiling of a sample.

18S ribosomal RNA gene

A gene located in the 40S ribosomal subunit found in eukaryotic cells, targeted in the analysis of fungal communities.

Alpha diversity

Microbiota diversity within an individual site or sample diversity; one value per sample.

Beta diversity

Intervariability, diversity between separate samples.

PCR bias

Unequal amounts of amplification across DNA sequences that leads to a skewed distribution of PCR products.

Metatranscriptomics

The study of RNA copies of the collective microbial genes in a community or sample.

Assembly

The process in which short DNA fragments are aligned and merged to form longer DNA fragments.

Contigs

Contiguous DNA sequences assembled from shorter, overlapping sequencing reads.

Annotation

Assigning functions or functional categories to gene or protein.

PHRED quality scores

A measure of the quality of base calling in a sequenced strand of DNA.

de Bruijn graphs

Consist of nodes (k-mers) and edges (overlaps between k-mers). The graph is constructed using k-mer overlaps leading to an assembled sequence.

Scaffolds

The product of aligning and merging contigs to form longer continuous DNA sequences.

Binning

Grouping DNA sequences based on particular attributes such as GC content or similarity with other genes.

k-mer

Short DNA sequence with fixed length k.

Homology

Shared ancestry or degree of relationship between sequences or genes.

Gene calling

Identifying coding regions in a sequence of DNA.

Orthologues

Genes in different species derived from a common ancestral gene following speciation, which usually retain the same function.

Pipelines

A series of tools or scripts optimized for the analysis of a dataset in which the outputs of one step are the inputs for next step.

Barcode sequence

A short series of DNA bases attached to sequence reads, each unique to a sample to enable differentiation after sequencing.

Operational taxonomic units

A collection (cluster) of sequences that are often at least 97% similar to each other and used to classify closely related individuals.

Reference database

A collection of known information (for example, gene sequences or functions) constructed in a format for querying or similarity-based searches.

Chimeric sequences

Artefacts from the PCR process in which an amplified sequence is composed of DNA from two or more parents.

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Claesson, M., Clooney, A. & O'Toole, P. A clinician's guide to microbiome analysis. Nat Rev Gastroenterol Hepatol 14, 585–595 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrgastro.2017.97

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