Abstract

Doc number: 103

Abstract

Background: Effective means are needed to efficiently collect fecal samples for microbiome analysis in large-scale epidemiological studies. Using twenty-four fecal aliquots prepared from three healthy individuals, we compared the following four fecal sample collection methods for assessment of human gut microbiome: 1) fecal occult blood test cards, held at room temperature for three days, 2) Eppendorf tubes, at room temperature for three days, 3) Eppendorf tubes with RNAlater, at room temperature, and 4) as controls, samples immediately frozen at -80°C. The 24 samples were assayed by 16S rRNA gene sequencing to compare overall microbiome structure and taxon distributions according to collection method.

Results: Storing fecal occult blood test card samples at room temperature for three days did not affect total DNA purity and relative 16S rRNA bacterial gene contents, compared with fresh frozen collection. Overall microbiome structure, based on phylogenetic UniFrac index, differed significantly by subject (p = 0.001), but microbiome structure (p = 0.497) and relative abundance of major microbial taxa (phyla) (p > 0.05) did not differ significantly by collection method.

Conclusions: Our findings suggest that low-cost fecal occult blood test card collection may be a feasible means of sample collection for fecal microbiome assessment in large-scale population-based studies.

Details

Title
Comparison of methods for fecal microbiome biospecimen collection
Author
Dominianni, Christine; Wu, Jing; Hayes, Richard B; Ahn, Jiyoung
Pages
103
Publication year
2014
Publication date
2014
Publisher
BioMed Central
e-ISSN
14712180
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
ProQuest document ID
1520244460
Copyright
© 2014 Dominianni et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver ( http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.