Showing posts with label gut ecology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gut ecology. Show all posts

Monday, June 13, 2016

This Month in Blastocystis Research (MAY 2016)

Very much belated, I'm back to give you the MAY entry of the 2016 "This Month in Blastocystis Research" blog series.

I'm basically just going to highlight a few papers and some other interesting things.

Ever since our metagenomics paper came out, it's as if the interest in Blastocystis in a gut microbiota context is exploding. If you put "Blastocystis microbiota" into the search box in PubMed, today you will get 20 hits, most of which papers are extremely interesting and of course very central to this type of research. Given the number of times I've addressed the relevance of studying Blastocystis in relation to gut microbiota diversity on this blog, I'll try not to flog it to death this time!

Over at Gut Microbiota For Health, a blog was posted a week ago summarising the recent findings of Audebert and colleagues and comparing them to data coming out from our lab. You can read the blog here. Using the Ion Torrent PGM sequencing platform, 16S rDNA gene sequencing was performed on genomic DNAs extracted from Blastocystis-positive and - negative stool samples. What Audebert hypothesised was that if Blastocystis is associated to intestinal disease such as for instance diarrhoea, one would expect to find a higher degree of microbiota perturbation (dysbiosis) in Blastocystis carriers than in non-carriers. Meanwhile, and similar to what we have have published, they reported that gut microbiota diversity is higher in Blastocystis carriers than in non-carriers, indicating that Blastocystis is generally a marker of a healthy gut microbiota rather than a perturbed one. Again similar to what we found in the metagenomics paper, Audebert et al. saw that the bacterial families Ruminococcaceae and Prevotellaceae were also more abundant in carriers than in Blastocystis-negative patients, while Enterobacteriaceae were enriched in Blastocystis-negative patients. What is also really interesting is the fact that the genera Faecalibacterium and Roseburia had a significantly higher abundance in Blastocystis-positive patients. These genera contain bacteria that produce butyrate which has a lot of important and beneficial functions. Loss of butyrate producers is seen for instance in patients with inflammatory bowel disease. The group used some of the same methods as we used in our study presented recently at ECCMID, including rarefaction analysis and calculation of Chao1 indices.

Together with colleagues at the Technical University of Denmark, we were lucky to have The European Journal of Clinical Microbiology and Infection publish our novel data on associations between common single-celled intestinal parasites--Blastocystis and Dientamoeba--and groups of intestinal bacteria, as evidenced by qPCR assays. We confirmed the findings from our metagenomics study, by finding a relatively lower abundance of Bacteroides in the parasite-positive samples than in the -negative ones.

By the way, on the Gut Microbiota For Health site you will find an e-learning course on Microbiota provided by the Gut Microbiota and Health Section of the European Society of Neurogastroenterology and Motility (ESNM) and developed for gastroenterologists.

Speaking of e-learning and gastroenterology: For a couple of years, I've had the immense pleasure of being part of the United European Gastroenterology e-learning task force. We host a resource - UEG Education - developed mainly for gastroenterologists, boasting e-learning courses, "Decide-on-the-Spot" series, "Mistakes in..." series, blogs, and other features. I have included a UEG widget in the right side bar of my blog - please click it!

Back to Blastocystis! Graham Clark and I published a personal view on the current status of Blastocystis in Parasitology International, in which we summarise the development and recent advances in Blastocystis research. The article is expected to form part of a special section/issue dedicated to Blastocystis to commemorate last year's 1st International Blastocystis Symposium in Ankara.

My colleague Juan-David Ramirez and his colleauges published data from a subtyping study from South America including 346 samples. More than 85% of the subtypes found belonged to either ST1, ST2, and ST3 as expected, while the rest belonged to ST4, ST5, ST6, ST7, ST8, ST12 and what they call a new subtype. I think this is the first time ST12 has been reported in humans. Despite the fact that the authors accounted for the databases that they used for subtype and allele calling, there is no mention on the criteria by which the subtypes were called in the NCBI database (i.e., in those cases where no hits could be found at the online Blastocystis database). For instance, what level of similarity was used to identify three samples as ST12? On the same note, which level of similarity was used to identify nine samples as belonging to a "novel subtype" (also, - was it the same sequence across the nine samples?). When dealing with a potentially novel subtype, usually the entire SSU rRNA gene is seqeunced and subjected to phylogenetic analysis, and sequences have not yet been made public in GenBank, so there is no possibility to work with the data so as to validate the findings (which are highly accurate, I'm sure). I think this information is critical to interpreting the data. Nontheless, the work that went into the sampling and the lab work should be highly accredited.

References:

Andersen LO, Bonde I, Nielsen HB, & Stensvold CR (2015). A retrospective metagenomics approach to studying Blastocystis. FEMS microbiology ecology, 91 (7) PMID: 26130823

Audebert C, Even G, Cian A, Blastocystis Investigation Group, Loywick A, Merlin S, Viscogliosi E, & Chabé M (2016). Colonization with the enteric protozoa Blastocystis is associated with increased diversity of human gut bacterial microbiota. Scientific reports, 6 PMID: 27147260  

O'Brien Andersen L, Karim AB, Roager HM, Vigsnæs LK, Krogfelt KA, Licht TR, & Stensvold CR (2016). Associations between common intestinal parasites and bacteria in humans as revealed by qPCR. European journal of clinical microbiology & infectious diseases : official publication of the European Society of Clinical Microbiology PMID: 27230509 

Ramírez JD, Sánchez A, Hernández C, Flórez C, Bernal MC, Giraldo JC, Reyes P, López MC, García L, Cooper PJ, Vicuña Y, Mongi F, & Casero RD (2016). Geographic distribution of human Blastocystis subtypes in South America. Infection, genetics and evolution : journal of molecular epidemiology and evolutionary genetics in infectious diseases, 41, 32-5 PMID: 27034056

Stensvold CR, & Clark CG (2016). Current status of Blastocystis: A personal view. Parasitology international PMID: 27247124   

Tuesday, September 1, 2015

This Month in Blastocystis Research (AUG 2015)

I would like to highlight a comment that we published in PLoS Pathogens, - a paper that is free for download here. It gained some attention on Twitter, and it was recently reviewed in the Faculty of 1000.

We basically highlight the tricky situation that we so often encounter in the field of clinical microbiology, namely the one in which all non-fungal organisms isolated from the human intestinal tract are being referred to collectively as 'parasites'. The word 'parasite' has a negative connotation, indicating that the organism exploits the host with detrimental effects on the host. While this is true for some ciliates, for instance Giardia, other ciliates may in fact be mutualists, which means that these organisms have adapted to a life within a host, providing the host with one or more advantages. One such example is seen in herbivores, where ciliates and flagallates break down cellulose.

In the clinical microbiology lab we face different types of organisms when dealing with stool samples: Giardia, Cryptosporidium and Entamoeba histolytica are considered true parasites, i.e. organisms benefitting from the environment of a host, at the expense of the host, and symptoms such as diarrhoea may develop, indicating host damage. Parasites such as Cryptospordium are usually infecting an individual for a short while, with immunity developing. Meanwhile, we also encounter eukaryotic organisms that are known to be able to colonise the intestine for a very long time, - decades, without being expelled by the host; Blastocystis belong to this group. For some reason it is as if the body 'tolerates' the presence of the organism. Maybe Blastocystis is good at evading local immune responses, or maybe the body wishes to 'keep' Blastocystis for some reason and so  developed a way to tolerate it... as I've hinted at before on this blog, maybe Blastocystis may assist us in one or more metabolic processes, for instance, either directly or indirectly, maybe by selecting for or influencing bacterial communities. Indeed, we recently found evidence of Blastocystis being specifically related to certain groups of bacteria, which, if confirmed, opens up for a whole new line of research, including the use of Blastocystis as a probiotic.

I know that this last sentence may sound harsh in some people's ears; nevertheless, most research involving Blastocystis so far has been quite static and unimaginative, and it's about time that food microbiologist and the like start taking an interest in the micro-eukaryotes that tend to be common and stable conolisers of our guts.

If YOU take an interest in this topic, I suggest you look up the articles cited below.

References and further reading:

Andersen LO, Bonde I, Nielsen HB, & Stensvold CR (2015). A retrospective metagenomics approach to studying Blastocystis. FEMS Microbiology Ecology, 91 (7) PMID: 26130823

Lukeš J, Stensvold CR, Jirků-Pomajbíková K, & Wegener Parfrey L (2015). Are Human Intestinal Eukaryotes Beneficial or Commensals? PLoS Pathogens, 11 (8) PMID: 26270819

Parfrey LW, Walters WA, & Knight R (2011). Microbial eukaryotes in the human microbiome: ecology, evolution, and future directions. Frontiers in Microbiology, 2 PMID: 21808637

Scanlan PD, Stensvold CR, Rajilić-Stojanović M, Heilig HG, De Vos WM, O'Toole PW, & Cotter PD (2014). The microbial eukaryote Blastocystis is a prevalent and diverse member of the healthy human gut microbiota. FEMS Microbiology Ecology, 90 (1), 326-30 PMID: 25077936