Defining factors affecting population dynamics of closely related bacteria in microbial communities

人类和动物被生活在人体每一个表面的数以万亿计的微生物定居。栖息在“微生物群”中的微生物对宿主的健康起着至关重要的作用。近年来，在基于DNA序列信息对微生物群落中的微生物多样性进行编目方面取得了重大进展，我们的研究小组开发了新的方法，用于高分辨率地描绘微生物群落，从而能够区分非常密切的物种。我们使用普遍保守的伴侣蛋白基因序列作为区分物种和识别功能相关的亚种组的条形码。伴侣序列比其他可用的通用靶标具有更高的分辨率，并使其有可能使用单个基因序列来区分传统定义物种中表型不同的细菌群体。我们应用这些方法发现，人类阴道微生物群中的一种常见细菌，

Humans and animals are colonized by trillions of microorganisms that live on every surface of the body. The microbes that inhabit the “microbiome” play a critical role in the health of their host. Significant progress has been made in recent years in cataloging microbial diversity in microbiomes based on DNA sequence information and our research group has developed novel methods for high resolution profiling of microbial communities that allow discrimination of very closely related species. We use the sequences of universally conserved chaperonin genes as “barcodes” for discriminating species and identifying functionally related subspecies groups. Chaperonin sequences have more resolving power than other available universal targets and make it possible to use a single gene sequence to discriminate phenotypically distinct groups of bacteria within traditionally defined species. We have applied these methods to discover that a common bacterium in the human vaginal microbiome,