Department of Pediatrics, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York, New York, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2011;6(12):e27858. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0027858. Epub 2011 Dec 8.
Extremely low birth weight (ELBW) infants have high morbidity and mortality, frequently due to invasive infections from bacteria, fungi, and viruses. The microbial communities present in the gastrointestinal tracts of preterm infants may serve as a reservoir for invasive organisms and remain poorly characterized. We used deep pyrosequencing to examine the gut-associated microbiome of 11 ELBW infants in the first postnatal month, with a first time determination of the eukaryote microbiota such as fungi and nematodes, including bacteria and viruses that have not been previously described. Among the fungi observed, Candida sp. and Clavispora sp. dominated the sequences, but a range of environmental molds were also observed. Surprisingly, seventy-one percent of the infant fecal samples tested contained ribosomal sequences corresponding to the parasitic organism Trichinella. Ribosomal DNA sequences for the roundworm symbiont Xenorhabdus accompanied these sequences in the infant with the greatest proportion of Trichinella sequences. When examining ribosomal DNA sequences in aggregate, Enterobacteriales, Pseudomonas, Staphylococcus, and Enterococcus were the most abundant bacterial taxa in a low diversity bacterial community (mean Shannon-Weaver Index of 1.02 ± 0.69), with relatively little change within individual infants through time. To supplement the ribosomal sequence data, shotgun sequencing was performed on DNA from multiple displacement amplification (MDA) of total fecal genomic DNA from two infants. In addition to the organisms mentioned previously, the metagenome also revealed sequences for gram positive and gram negative bacteriophages, as well as human adenovirus C. Together, these data reveal surprising eukaryotic and viral microbial diversity in ELBW enteric microbiota dominated bytypes of bacteria known to cause invasive disease in these infants.
极低出生体重（ELBW）婴儿的发病率和死亡率都很高，这通常是由于细菌、真菌和病毒的侵袭性感染所致。早产儿胃肠道中存在的微生物群落可能是侵袭性生物的储库，但目前对其特征的了解还很有限。我们使用深度焦磷酸测序技术研究了 11 名 ELBW 婴儿在出生后第一个月的肠道相关微生物组，首次确定了真核生物微生物群落，如真菌和线虫，包括以前未描述过的细菌和病毒。在观察到的真菌中，假丝酵母属和荚膜组织胞浆菌属占据主导地位，但也观察到了一系列环境霉菌。令人惊讶的是，71%的婴儿粪便样本中含有与寄生虫旋毛虫相对应的核糖体序列。与旋毛虫序列一起存在于婴儿体内的还有共生蛔虫属的线虫的核糖体 DNA 序列，该婴儿的旋毛虫序列比例最高。当综合检查核糖体 DNA 序列时，肠杆菌科、假单胞菌属、葡萄球菌属和肠球菌属是低多样性细菌群落中最丰富的细菌分类群（平均香农-威纳指数为 1.02±0.69），个体婴儿之间的变化相对较小。为了补充核糖体序列数据，我们对来自两个婴儿的粪便总基因组 DNA 多重置换扩增（MDA）的 DNA 进行了鸟枪法测序。除了之前提到的生物外，宏基因组还揭示了革兰氏阳性和革兰氏阴性噬菌体以及人类腺病毒 C 的序列。这些数据共同揭示了在 ELBW 肠道微生物群中存在惊人的真核生物和病毒微生物多样性，其细菌群以已知会导致这些婴儿侵袭性疾病的细菌为主。
