Glycans form the primary nutritional source for microbes in the human gut, and understanding their metabolism is a critical yet understudied aspect of microbiome research. Here, we present a novel computational pipeline for modeling glycan degradation (GlyDeR) which predicts the glycan degradation potency of 10,000 reference glycans based on either genomic or metagenomic data. We first validated GlyDeR by comparing degradation profiles for genomes in the Human Microbiome Project against KEGG reaction annotations. Next, we applied GlyDeR to the analysis of human and mammalian gut microbial communities, which revealed that the glycan degradation potential of a community is strongly linked to host diet and can be used to predict diet with higher accuracy than sequence data alone. Finally, we show that a microbe's glycan degradation potential is significantly correlated (R = 0.46) with its abundance, with even higher correlations for potential pathogens such as the class Clostridia (R = 0.76). GlyDeR therefore represents an important tool for advancing our understanding of bacterial metabolism in the gut and for the future development of more effective prebiotics for microbial community manipulation.
Pubmed ID: 25118239 RIS Download
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Common repository for diverse human microbiome datsets and minimum reporting standards for Common Fund Human Microbiome Project.
View all literature mentionsPortal which provides access to scientific databases and software tools (i.e., resources) in different areas of life sciences including proteomics, genomics, phylogeny, systems biology, population genetics, transcriptomics etc. It contains resources from many different SIB groups as well as external institutions.
View all literature mentionsWeb search tool to find regions of similarity between biological sequences. Program compares nucleotide or protein sequences to sequence databases and calculates statistical significance. Used for identifying homologous sequences.
View all literature mentionsTHIS RESOURCE IS NO LONGER IN SERVICE documented on June 4, 2013. Aldente is a tool to identify proteins from peptide mass fingerprinting data. This fast and powerful tool takes advantage of the Hough transform for spectra recalibration and outlier exclusion. The Aldente search form can be used in two modes: for a global view of all the search parameters on one page: click on the section tab All. This global view is useful to have a quick overview before sending the query. to have search parameters grouped into smaller logical sections: click on the corresponding section tab in the tabs banner. Note! Moving from one section to another keeps search parameter selections. For your convenience, you may view / hide the help during your search parameters selection. Use the Help or No help section tab accordingly.
View all literature mentionsIntegrated database resource consisting of 16 main databases, broadly categorized into systems information, genomic information, and chemical information. In particular, gene catalogs in completely sequenced genomes are linked to higher-level systemic functions of cell, organism, and ecosystem. Analysis tools are also available. KEGG may be used as reference knowledge base for biological interpretation of large-scale datasets generated by sequencing and other high-throughput experimental technologies.
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