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Comment
. 2015 Jun 2;112(22):6778-9.
doi: 10.1073/pnas.1507731112. Epub 2015 May 26.

Elucidating microbial codes to distinguish individuals

Allyson L Byrd  1 , Julia A Segre  2
Affiliations
Comment

Elucidating microbial codes to distinguish individuals

Allyson L Byrd et al. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. .
No abstract available

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Fig. 1.
Fig. 1.
(A) Four individuals and their color-coded features (circles). More circles indicate a more abundant feature. (B) Example of an efficient greedy approach used to construct a minimal hitting set for individual 1. Venn diagrams demonstrate features present in individual 1 compared with other individuals. For each comparison, the nonhit set is those features found exclusively in individual 1. The candidate hitting set is iteratively created by adding the most common elements among the nonhit sets. Large, not slashed circles represent features included in the code. (C) Simplified example of a biologically informed greedy code construction for individual 1 that prioritizes feature stability. Individual 1’s detectable features are ordered by descending abundance gap. In an iterative manner, the highest ranked feature is used to remove individuals from part A in whom this feature was not found. Only if a feature removes an individual does it become part of the code. For example, the red feature distinguishes individual 1 from individual 2 and therefore is part of individual 1’s code. The code is complete when individual 1 can be excluded from all individuals in part A. (D) Possible results include the following: a true positive, individual 1’s code remains stable; a false negative, individual 2 lost the brown feature and therefore his code no longer matches him; a false positive, individual 4 acquired the yellow feature so now matches his own code in addition to individual 2’s code. Large circles comprise unique codes for each individual in part A. Note: individual 3 lacks a unique code because all of his features are shared with individual 1.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

Comment on

  • Identifying personal microbiomes using metagenomic codes.
    Franzosa EA, Huang K, Meadow JF, Gevers D, Lemon KP, Bohannan BJ, Huttenhower C. Franzosa EA, et al. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2015 Jun 2;112(22):E2930-8. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1423854112. Epub 2015 May 11. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2015. PMID: 25964341 Free PMC article.

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