Introducing the sporobiota and sporobiome

Abstract

Unrelated spore-forming bacteria share unique characteristics stemming from the presence of highly resistant endospores, leading to similar challenges in health and disease. These characteristics are related to the presence of these highly transmissible spores, which are commonly spread within the environment and are implicated in host-to-host transmission. In humans, spore-forming bacteria contribute to a variety of pathological processes that share similar characteristics, including persistence, chronicity, relapses and the maintenance of the resistome. We first outline the necessity of characterizing the totality of the spore-forming bacteria as the sporobiota based on their unique common characteristics. We further propose that the collection of all genes of spore-forming bacteria be known as the sporobiome. Such differentiation is critical for exploring the cross-talk between the sporobiota and other members of the gut microbiota, and will allow for a better understanding of the implications of the sporobiota and sporobiome in a variety of pathologies and the spread of antibiotic resistance.

Fig. 1

Conceptual presentation of the sporobiota. The boxes represent different levels of possible sporobiota representation. The global sporobiota comprises the totality of all endospore-forming bacteria. Both the human microbiota and the disease-associated sporobiota (clinical sporobiota) are subsets of the total global sporobiota. The global sporobiota, human sporobiota, disease-associated sporobiota, gut sporobiota and the resistome overlap, as spore-formers play a role in horizontal gene transfer

Fig. 2

Phylogenetic representation of global sporobiome families based on 16S sequence similarity. Alignment was performed with CLUSTAL W. The visualization of phylogenetic trees and statistical analyses were performed using iToL [18]