The impact of antibiotic exposure on antibiotic resistance gene dynamics in the gut microbiota of inflammatory bowel disease patients.

Background: While antibiotics are commonly used to treat inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), their widespread application can disturb the gut microbiota and foster the emergence and spread of antibiotic resistance. However, the dynamic changes to the human gut microbiota and direction of resistance gene transmission under antibiotic effects have not been clearly elucidated. Methods: Based on the Human Microbiome Project, a total of 90 fecal samples were collected from 30 IBD patients before, during and after antibiotic treatment. Through the analysis workflow of metagenomics, we described the dynamic process of changes in bacterial communities and resistance genes pre-treatment, during and post-treatment. We explored potential consistent relationships between gut microbiota and resistance genes, and established gene transmission networks among species before and after antibiotic use. Results: Exposure to antibiotics can induce alterations in the composition of the gut microbiota in IBD patients, particularly a reduction in probiotics, which gradually recovers to a new steady state after cessation of antibiotics. Network analyses revealed intra-phylum transfers of resistance genes, predominantly between taxonomically close organisms. Specific resistance genes showed increased prevalence and inter-species mobility after antibiotic cessation. Conclusion: This study demonstrates that antibiotics shape the gut resistome through selective enrichment and promotion of horizontal gene transfer. The findings provide insights into ecological processes governing resistance gene dynamics and dissemination upon antibiotic perturbation of the microbiota. Optimizing antibiotic usage may help limit unintended consequences like increased resistance in gut bacteria during IBD management.

Rapid discrimination of Bifidobacterium longum subspecies based on MALDI-TOF MS and machine learning.

Although MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry (MS) is widely known as a rapid and cost-effective reference method for identifying microorganisms, its commercial databases face limitations in accurately distinguishing specific subspecies of Bifidobacterium. This study aimed to explore the potential of MALDI-TOF MS protein profiles, coupled with prediction methods, to differentiate between Bifidobacterium longum subsp. infantis (B. infantis) and Bifidobacterium longum subsp. longum (B. longum). The investigation involved the analysis of mass spectra of 59 B. longum strains and 41 B. infantis strains, leading to the identification of five distinct biomarker peaks, specifically at m/z 2,929, 4,408, 5,381, 5,394, and 8,817, using Recurrent Feature Elimination (RFE). To facilate classification between B. longum and B. infantis based on the mass spectra, machine learning models were developed, employing algorithms such as logistic regression (LR), random forest (RF), and support vector machine (SVM). The evaluation of the mass spectrometry data showed that the RF model exhibited the highest performace, boasting an impressive AUC of 0.984. This model outperformed other algorithms in terms of accuracy and sensitivity. Furthermore, when employing a voting mechanism on multi-mass spectrometry data for strain identificaton, the RF model achieved the highest accuracy of 96.67%. The outcomes of this research hold the significant potential for commercial applications, enabling the rapid and precise discrimination of B. longum and B. infantis using MALDI-TOF MS in conjunction with machine learning. Additionally, the approach proposed in this study carries substantial implications across various industries, such as probiotics and pharmaceuticals, where the precise differentiation of specific subspecies is essential for product development and quality control.

Revealing transcription factor and histone modification co-localization and dynamics across cell lines by integrating ChIP-seq and RNA-seq data.

BACKGROUND: Interactions among transcription factors (TFs) and histone modifications (HMs) play an important role in the precise regulation of gene expression. The context specificity of those interactions and further its dynamics in normal and disease remains largely unknown. Recent development in genomics technology enables transcription profiling by RNA-seq and protein's binding profiling by ChIP-seq. Integrative analysis of the two types of data allows us to investigate TFs and HMs interactions both from the genome co-localization and downstream target gene expression. RESULTS: We propose a integrative pipeline to explore the co-localization of 55 TFs and 11 HMs and its dynamics in human GM12878 and K562 by matched ChIP-seq and RNA-seq data from ENCODE. We classify TFs and HMs into three types based on their binding enrichment around transcription start site (TSS). Then a set of statistical indexes are proposed to characterize the TF-TF and TF-HM co-localizations. We found that Rad21, SMC3, and CTCF co-localized across five cell lines. High resolution Hi-C data in GM12878 shows that they associate most of the Hi-C peak loci with a specific CTCF-motif "anchor" and supports that CTCF, SMC3, and RAD2 co-localization serves important role in 3D chromatin structure. Meanwhile, 17 TF-TF pairs are highly dynamic between GM12878 and K562. We then build SVM models to correlate high and low expression level of target genes with TF binding and HM strength. We found that H3k9ac, H3k27ac, and three TFs (ELF1, TAF1, and POL2) are predictive with the accuracy about 85~92%. CONCLUSION: We propose a pipeline to analyze the co-localization of TF and HM and their dynamics across cell lines from ChIP-seq, and investigate their regulatory potency by RNA-seq. The integrative analysis of two level data reveals new insight for the cooperation of TFs and HMs and is helpful in understanding cell line specificity of TF/HM interactions.