Highlights d Cities possess a consistent ''core'' set of non-human microbes d Urban microbiomes echo important features of cities and city-life d Antimicrobial resistance genes are widespread in cities d Cities contain many novel bacterial and viral species
Although disinfection is key to infection control, the colonization patterns and resistomes of hospital-environment microbes remain underexplored. We report the first extensive genomic characterization of microbiomes, pathogens and antibiotic resistance cassettes in a tertiary-care hospital, from repeated sampling (up to 1.5 years apart) of 179 sites associated with 45 beds. Deep shotgun metagenomics unveiled distinct ecological niches of microbes and antibiotic resistance genes characterized by biofilm-forming and human-microbiome-influenced environments with corresponding patterns of spatiotemporal divergence. Quasi-metagenomics with nanopore sequencing provided thousands of high-contiguity genomes, phage and plasmid sequences (>60% novel), enabling characterization of resistome and mobilome diversity and dynamic architectures in hospital environments. Phylogenetics identified multidrug-resistant strains as being widely distributed and stably colonizing across sites. Comparisons with clinical isolates indicated that such microbes can persist in hospitals for extended periods (>8 years), to opportunistically infect patients. These findings highlight the importance of characterizing antibiotic resistance reservoirs in hospitals and establish the feasibility of systematic surveys to target resources for preventing infections.
Although studies have shown that urban environments and mass-transit systems have distinct genetic profiles, there are no systematic studies of these dense, human/microbial ecosystems around the world. To address this gap in knowledge, we created a global metagenomic and antimicrobial resistance (AMR) atlas of urban mass transit systems from 58 cities, spanning 3,741 samples and 4,424 taxonomically-defined microorganisms collected for from 2015-2017. The map provides annotated, geospatial details about microbial strains, functional genetics, antimicrobial resistance, and novel genetic elements, including 10,928 novel predicted viral species. Urban microbiomes often resemble human commensal microbiomes from the skin and airways, but also contain a consistent "core" of 61 species which are predominantly not human commensal species. Conversely, samples may be accurately (91.4%) classified to their city-oforigin using a linear support vector machine over taxa. These data also show that AMR density across cities varies by several orders of magnitude, including many AMRs present on plasmids with specific cosmopolitan distributions. Together, these results constitute a high-resolution global metagenomic atlas, which enables the discovery of new genetic components of the built human environment, highlights potential forensic applications, and provides an essential first draft of the global AMR burden of the world's cities.
BackgroundSome of the recent investigations in systems biology have revealed the existence of a complex regulatory network between genes, microRNAs (miRNAs) and transcription factors (TFs). In this paper, we focus on TF to miRNA regulation and provide a novel interface for extracting the list of putative TFs for human miRNAs. A putative TF of an miRNA is considered here as those binding within the close genomic locality of that miRNA with respect to its starting or ending base pair on the chromosome. Recent studies suggest that these putative TFs are possible regulators of those miRNAs.DescriptionThe interface is built around two datasets that consist of the exhaustive lists of putative TFs binding respectively in the 10 kb upstream region (USR) and downstream region (DSR) of human miRNAs. A web server, named as PuTmiR, is designed. It provides an option for extracting the putative TFs for human miRNAs, as per the requirement of a user, based on genomic locality, i.e., any upstream or downstream region of interest less than 10 kb. The degree distributions of the number of putative TFs and miRNAs against each other for the 10 kb USR and DSR are analyzed from the data and they explore some interesting results. We also report about the finding of a significant regulatory activity of the YY1 protein over a set of oncomiRNAs related to the colon cancer.ConclusionThe interface provided by the PuTmiR web server provides an important resource for analyzing the direct and indirect regulation of human miRNAs. While it is already an established fact that miRNAs are regulated by TFs binding to their USR, this database might possibly help to study whether an miRNA can also be regulated by the TFs binding to their DSR.
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