Genome analysis of bacteria inhabiting the mucosal surface of intestine
Japan Society for the Promotion of Science:Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research
Date (from‐to) : 2006 -2007
Author : HAYASHI Tetsuya; NAKAYAMA Keisuke; OGURA Yoshitoshi; OOKA Tadasuke; KUWAHARA Tomomi; KUROKAWA Ken
The final goal of our research is to clarify the compositional and genomic features of gut microbiota and their positional differences. However, it is impossible to know the positional differences by metagenomic analysis of fecal samples. We need to analyze the samples that are obtained directly from intestine, but such sampling in human is accompanied by many technical and ethical problems. Therefore, the mouse intestine was used as a model system in our study. In the present research project, we focused on the microbiota residing on the mucosal surface, which are obviously playing most important roles in term of host-resident microbe interaction, particularly on genome sequence determination of segmented filamentous bacterium (SFB). SFB is an unculturable bacterium which appears on the mucosal surface as a dominant bacterial species during the period of weaning.
We first isolated about 5,000 SFB cells from the intestine of weanling mice by a micromanipulator, amplified their genomic DNA by rolling circle amplification, and tried to determine the sequence by the random shotgun sequencing method. However, we found that plasmid DNA was preferentially amplified, and thus, it is very hard to determine the whole genome sequence by this strategy. Therefore, we cultivated SFB cells in gnotobiotic mice, and prepare their DNA for genome sequencing. We then constructed a random shotgun library of SFB, and generated about 50,000 shotgun reads. Contamination of DNA derived from other bacterial species severely disturbed our analysis, but by PCR-based gap closing, we have obtained 50 super-contigs. For the final finishing process, we have re-isolated SFB cells and prepared a BAC library. Currently, we are determining the end-sequences of 1,200 BAC clones for the final finishing process. The approach we employed in this study is a new strategy for the genome analysis of unculturable bacteria in gut microbiota.