Vinod Kumar Gupta
Posters-Accepted Abstracts: Biol Syst Open Access
In a human body, the distinct body-sites form unique niches for the resident microbiota. There has been an increasing amount of literature on the habitat-specific variations in the microbiome composition at the phylum, genus or species levels not much information is available on the variations at the genome/sub-genome levels of a specific microbial community across different niches. This report aims to explore as a case study the habitat-driven changes in the gene repertoire of 28 Prevotella reference genomes derived from different body-sites. Pan-genome analysis of Prevotella has yielded 24885 distinct gene families. Among these 456 form the conserved core, 7263 are accessory genes and 17166 are singletons. The study reveals exclusive presence of 11798, 3673, 3348 and 934 gene families and exclusive absence of 17, 221, 115 and 645 gene families in Prevotella genomes derived from oral cavity, gut, urogenital-tract and skin respectively. Distribution of functional COG categories differs appreciably among the niche-specific genes. Accessory and singletons show high frequencies of Signal transduction mechanisms category in skin and gut isolates while Defense mechanisms category is over represented among singletons of the urogenital-tract and some oral isolates. These observations clearly point towards the niche-specific modulation in genetic make-ups of microbiome components. Plausible metabolic/physiological implications of such niche-specific gene repertoire are now being investigated in an attempt to have an insight into the host-microbiome interactions at different body-sites. A novel computational pipeline for pan-genome analysis of microbial organisms has also been developed in course of this study.
