Abstract
Relatively little progress in the methodology for differentiating between the healthy and diseased microbiomes, beyond comparing microbial community diversities with traditional species richness or Shannon index, has been made. Network analysis has increasingly been called for the task, but most currently available microbiome datasets only allows for the construction of simple species correlation networks (SCNs). The main results from SCN analysis are a series of network properties such as network degree and modularity, but the metrics for these network properties often produce inconsistent evidence. We propose a simple new network property, the P/N ratio, defined as the ratio of positive links to the number of negative links in the microbial SCN. We postulate that the P/N ratio should reflect the balance between facilitative and inhibitive interactions among microbial species, possibly one of the most important changes occurring in diseased microbiome. We tested our hypothesis with five datasets representing five major human microbiome sites and discovered that the P/N ratio exhibits contrasting differences between healthy and diseased microbiomes and may be harnessed as an in silico biomarker for detecting disease-associated changes in the human microbiome, and may play an important role in personalized diagnosis of the human microbiome-associated diseases.
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13 November 2017
The original version of this article unfortunately contained a missing image. The flowchart was not captured in PDF version. The original article was corrected.
Abbreviations
- AD:
-
Atopic Dermatitis
- ART:
-
Antiretroviral Therapy
- BV:
-
Bacterial Vaginosis
- CF:
-
Cystic Fibrosis
- HMP:
-
(Human Microbiome Project)
- OTU:
-
(Operational Taxonomic Unit)
- MAO:
-
(Most Abundant OTU)
- P/N Ratio:
-
The ratio of positive links to the number of negative links in the microbial SCN
- PB:
-
Periodontitis with Bleeding
- PnB:
-
Periodontitis with no Bleeding
- SAD:
-
Species abundance distribution
- SCN:
-
Species Correlation Network
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Acknowledgements
I thank Prof. Ian McHardy, UCLA Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, UCLA, USA, and Prof. Vladimir Lazarevic, Genomic Research Laboratory, Geneva University Hospitals, Switzerland, for their generous help by providing us the OTU tables from their original studies. We are also indebted to the help from Jie Li and Lianwei Li of the Computational Biology and Medical Ecology Lab, Chinese Academy of Sciences, for their helps in performing the data analysis.
Funding
The study received funding from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 71473243), an International Cooperative Grant and a Key Project of Biomedicine and Health from Yunnan Province, China.
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Z Ma designed and conducted the study, and wrote the paper.
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I declare no conflict of interests.
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The datasets utilized in this study are available in the original studies cited in Table 1.
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The original version of this article was revised: The flowchart was not captured in PDF version.
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Ma, Z. The P/N (Positive-to-Negative Links) Ratio in Complex Networks—A Promising In Silico Biomarker for Detecting Changes Occurring in the Human Microbiome. Microb Ecol 75, 1063–1073 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00248-017-1079-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00248-017-1079-7