Most of my PhD work was on the vaginal microbiome. At the end of my PhD another graduate student, Amy McMillan, started to uncover the metabolic markers of the vaginal microbiome and conditions like bacterial vaginosis (BV). Her paper has been under review at PNAS, and a draft was recently made available on the arXiv: A multi-platform metabolomics approach identifies novel biomarkers associated with bacterial diversity in the human vagina (McMillan et al, 2015)
Unfortunately, someone beat us to the punch. A paper was published this week in mBio by Srinivasan et al.: Metabolic Signatures of Bacterial Vaginosis (Srinivasan et al., 2015. mBio)
Although with similar aims, our paper not only differentiates BV from health with metabolic markers, but we explore the effect of pregnancy in women from Rwanda.
In a positive spin (if there is any light side to getting scooped), Srinivasan et al. did observe a number of metabolic markers we had previously predicted using metatranscriptomics: Comparative meta-RNA-seq of the vaginal microbiota and differential expression by Lactobacillus iners in health and dysbiosis (Macklaim et al., 2013. Microbiome Journal). Notably, we predicted elevated glycerol and glycerol-3-P utilizing enzymes under BV conditions, and Srinivasan et al. reported both these molecules depleted in BV.
In some ways it's very reassuring to see your previous work validated in another way/by another group. But, unfortunately, our metatranscriptome paper was not cited for this finding.
Figure 3 from Macklaim et al., 2013. Microbiome Journal, Comparative meta-RNA-seq of the vaginal microbiota and differential expression by Lactobacillus iners in health and dysbiosis
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