Metabolic network percolation quantifies biosynthetic capabilities across the human oral microbiome
- Boston University, United States
- The Forsyth Institute, United States
Abstract
The biosynthetic capabilities of microbes underlie their growth and interactions, playing a prominent role in microbial community structure. For large, diverse microbial communities, prediction of these capabilities is limited by uncertainty about metabolic functions and environmental conditions. To address this challenge, we propose a probabilistic method, inspired by percolation theory, to computationally quantify how robustly a genome-derived metabolic network produces a given set of metabolites under an ensemble of variable environments. We used this method to compile an atlas of predicted biosynthetic capabilities for 97 metabolites across 456 human oral microbes. This atlas captures taxonomically-related trends in biomass composition, and makes it possible to estimate inter-microbial metabolic distances that correlate with microbial co-occurrences. We also found a distinct cluster of fastidious/uncultivated taxa, including several Saccharibacteria (TM7) species, characterized by their abundant metabolic deficiencies. By embracing uncertainty, our approach can be broadly applied to understanding metabolic interactions in complex microbial ecosystems.
Data availability
All scripts and metabolic network data used for generating the manuscript results are available on GitHub (https://github.com/segrelab/biosynthetic_network_robustness) (f82f1e0).All genomes used to derive the metabolic networks are available from the Human Oral Microbiome Database (http://www.homd.org/), except for three strains whose genomes are available on NCBI GenBank, with the following accession numbers: Saccharibacteria (TM7) bacterium HMT-488 strain AC001: NCBI CP040003, Saccharibacteria (TM7) bacterium HMT-955 strain PM004: NCBI CP040008, Pseudopropionibacterium propionicum HMT-439 strain F0700: NCBI CP040007.The data shown in the figures are also available in the form of supplementary tables included in the manuscript submission.
-
E. coli auxotrophs growth dataEMBO Press, DOI 10.1038/msb.2010.66.
-
Microbial co-occurrence dataPLOS Computional Biology, doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002687.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (R37DE016937)
- Floyd E Dewhirst
National Institute of General Medical Sciences (R01GM121950)
- Daniel Segre
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (HR0011-15-C-0091)
- Daniel Segre
Biological and Environmental Research (DE-SC0012627)
- Daniel Segre
National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (R01DE024468)
- Floyd E Dewhirst
- Daniel Segre
National Institute of General Medical Sciences (T32GM008764)
- David B Bernstein
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2019, Bernstein et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
Metrics
-
- 3,961
- views
-
- 489
- downloads
-
- 23
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Metabolic network percolation quantifies biosynthetic capabilities across the human oral microbiome
eLife 8:e39733.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.39733
Further reading
-
- Computational and Systems Biology
- Ecology
Environmental DNA (eDNA) is becoming an increasingly important tool in diverse scientific fields from ecological biomonitoring to wastewater surveillance of viruses. The fundamental challenge in eDNA analyses has been the bioinformatical assignment of reads to taxonomic groups. It has long been known that full probabilistic methods for phylogenetic assignment are preferable, but unfortunately, such methods are computationally intensive and are typically inapplicable to modern Next-Generation Sequencing data. We here present a fast approximate likelihood method for phylogenetic assignment of DNA sequences. Applying the new method to several mock communities and simulated datasets, we show that it identifies more reads at both high and low taxonomic levels more accurately than other leading methods. The advantage of the method is particularly apparent in the presence of polymorphisms and/or sequencing errors and when the true species is not represented in the reference database.
-
- Computational and Systems Biology
- Physics of Living Systems
B-cell repertoires are characterized by a diverse set of receptors of distinct specificities generated through two processes of somatic diversification: V(D)J recombination and somatic hypermutations. B cell clonal families stem from the same V(D)J recombination event, but differ in their hypermutations. Clonal families identification is key to understanding B-cell repertoire function, evolution and dynamics. We present HILARy (High-precision Inference of Lineages in Antibody Repertoires), an efficient, fast and precise method to identify clonal families from single- or paired-chain repertoire sequencing datasets. HILARy combines probabilistic models that capture the receptor generation and selection statistics with adapted clustering methods to achieve consistently high inference accuracy. It automatically leverages the phylogenetic signal of shared mutations in difficult repertoire subsets. Exploiting the high sensitivity of the method, we find the statistics of evolutionary properties such as the site frequency spectrum and 𝑑𝑁∕𝑑𝑆 ratio do not depend on the junction length. We also identify a broad range of selection pressures spanning two orders of magnitude.
