What is it about?
We used a combination of classical microbiology and computational biology to characterise Klebsiella species present in the gut microbiota of preterm infants, to see how diverse the bacteria were and whether they had similar properties in healthy and sick babies. We also showed that Klebsiella michiganensis is more relevant to the preterm infant gut microbiota than Klebsiella oxytoca, but it is only with analyses of genomic data these species can be differentiated from one another and other closely related bacteria.
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Why is it important?
To understand how Klebsiella species cause infections such as late-onset sepsis and nectrotizing enterocolitis in preterm babies, we need to isolate bacteria from the infant gut microbiota and use them in models of infection. The work described in our study is the first step in this - i.e. in-depth genomic and phenotypic characterisation of a range of Klebsiella species isolated from the gut microbiota of preterm infants. Our work also highlights the importance of creating properly curated databases to use with bioinformatics approaches to study the infant gut microbiota in detail.
Perspectives
This was a great collaborative project to work on. What started out as a small isolation study got a lot more interesting when we combined it with genomic data - generating our own, and using publicly available datasets to reinforce our findings.
Professor Lesley Hoyles
Nottingham Trent University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Preterm infants harbour diverse Klebsiella populations, including atypical species that encode and produce an array of antimicrobial resistance- and virulence-associated factors, September 2019, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press,
DOI: 10.1101/761924.
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Contributors
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