In IBD the dominant fecal microbiota comprises unusual bacterial species. Moreover, CD and UC fecal microbiota harbor specific discrepancies and differ from that of IC and healthy subjects.

The composition of the colonic microbiota of 91 northern Europeans was characterized by fluorescent in situ hybridization using 18 phylogenetic probes. On average 75% of the bacteria were identified, and large interindividual variations were observed. Clostridium coccoides and Clostridium leptum were the dominant groups (28.0% and 25.2%), followed by the Bacteroides (8.5%). According to principal component analysis, no significant grouping with respect to geographic origin, age, or gender was observed.For the past 10 years, the progress made in molecular technologies has given rise to new ways to explore the human colonic microbiota. Investigations based on 16S rRNA sequences have revealed the presence of hundreds of molecular species, the majority uncultivated and/or not yet cultivated, unique to their host and with few species shared between two individuals (5, 10, 13). Fluorescent in situ hybridization (FISH) (1) of the 16S rRNA has shown that the species diversity comprised less than 20 dominant phylogenetic groups (2-4, 7). However, the molecular analysis has so far been restricted to limited cohorts of individuals, recruited within a single geographic region or country (3,4,7,8,14). In this study, we characterized the fecal microbiota of 91 individuals from five northern European countries to provide a large-scale molecular analysis of the normal colonic microbiota in healthy humans. Multivariate data analysis was performed in order to seek a possible link between the composition of the fecal microbiota and age, gender, or geographic origin parameters.

BackgroundBACTIBASE is an integrated open-access database designed for the characterization of bacterial antimicrobial peptides, commonly known as bacteriocins.DescriptionFor its second release, BACTIBASE has been expanded and equipped with additional functions aimed at both casual and power users. The number of entries has been increased by 44% and includes data collected from published literature as well as high-throughput datasets. The database provides a manually curated annotation of bacteriocin sequences. Improvements brought to BACTIBASE include incorporation of various tools for bacteriocin analysis, such as homology search, multiple sequence alignments, Hidden Markov Models, molecular modelling and retrieval through our taxonomy Browser.ConclusionThe provided features should make BACTIBASE a useful tool in food preservation or food safety applications and could have implications for the development of new drugs for medical use. BACTIBASE is available at http://bactibase.pfba-lab-tun.org.

The bacterial community, in whole or in part, resident in the bowel of humans is considered to fuel the chronic immune inflammatory conditions characteristic of Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis. Chronic or recurrent pouchitis in ulcerative colitis patients is responsive to antibiotic therapy, indicating that bacteria are the etiological agents. Microbiological investigations of the bacterial communities in stool or of biopsy-associated bacteria have so far failed to reveal conclusively the existence of pathogens or bacterial communities of consistently altered composition in IBD patients relative to control subjects. Confounding factors need to be eliminated from future studies by using better-defined patient populations of newly diagnosed and untreated individuals and by improved sampling procedures.

Among human faecal bacteria, many members of the Clostridium leptum subgroup are fibrolytic and butyrate producing microorganisms thereby contributing to processes important to colonic health. Yet this phylogenetic subgroup remains poorly described to date. To improve detection and description of members of the C. leptum subgroup, the Clep 866 group probe was developed. Its association with probes targeting the Clostridium viride cluster (Cvir 1414) and Eubacterium desmolans species (Edes 635) allowed for the first time the detection of all members found in this phylogenetic group in human faecal microbiota. A species-specific probe was also designed to detect members of the Ruminococcus callidus species (Rcal 733). The design of signature regions was based on alignment of 16S rRNA sequences isolated from faeces of five healthy adults. Furthermore, an oligonucleotide competitor strategy was developed in order to improve the specificity of the probes formerly validated or designed in this study. The oligonucleotide probes were tested using a collection of target and non-target strains using FISH combined with flow cytometry. These new probes were added to a panel of 18 phylogenetic probes selected to describe faecal microbiota composition in 21 human faeces of healthy adults. Clostridium leptum subgroup represented 22% of the total faecal bacteria and codominated with members of Clostridium coccoides group. The cluster Faecalibacterium prausnitzii was the dominant component of the C. leptum subgroup and 20% of the latter subgroup remained unidentified at the species level.

BBn (BioBreeding) rats were fed casein-based diets supplemented with barley flour, oatmeal flour, cellulose, or barley ␤-glucans of high [HV] or low viscosity [LV] in order to measure the prebiotic effects of these different sources of dietary fiber. The dietary impact on the composition of the cecal microbiota was determined by the generation of denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis (DGGE) profiles of PCR-amplified 16S rRNA gene sequences. The DGGE profiles produced from the cecal microbiota of rats within each dietary group were similar, but consensus profiles generated from pooled bacterial DNAs showed differences between rat groups. Animals fed HV glucans (HV-fed rats) had DGGE consensus profiles that were 30% dissimilar from those of the other rat groups. A 16S rRNA gene fragment that was more conspicuous in the profiles of HV-fed animals than in those of cellulose-fed rats had sequence identity with Lactobacillus acidophilus. Measurements of L. acidophilus rRNA abundance (DNA-RNA hybridization), the preparation of cloned 16S rRNA gene libraries, and the enumeration of Lactobacillus cells (fluorescent in situ hybridization) showed that lactobacilli formed a greater proportion of the cecal microbiota in HV-fed rats. In vitro experiments confirmed that some lactobacilli utilize oligosaccharides (degree of polymerization, 3 or 4) present in ␤-glucan hydrolysates. The results of this study have relevance to the use of purified ␤-glucan products as dietary supplements for human consumption.

The high throughput and cost-effectiveness afforded by short-read sequencing technologies, in principle, enable researchers to perform 16S rRNA profiling of complex microbial communities at unprecedented depth and resolution. Existing Illumina sequencing protocols are, however, limited by the fraction of the 16S rRNA gene that is interrogated and therefore limit the resolution and quality of the profiling. To address this, we present the design of a novel protocol for shotgun Illumina sequencing of the bacterial 16S rRNA gene, optimized to amplify more than 90% of sequences in the Greengenes database and with the ability to distinguish nearly twice as many species-level OTUs compared to existing protocols. Using several in silico and experimental datasets, we demonstrate that despite the presence of multiple variable and conserved regions, the resulting shotgun sequences can be used to accurately quantify the constituents of complex microbial communities. The reconstruction of a significant fraction of the 16S rRNA gene also enabled high precision (>90%) in species-level identification thereby opening up potential application of this approach for clinical microbial characterization.

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