More than 9,000,000 unique genes in human gut bacterial community: estimating gene numbers inside a human body.
<h4>Background</h4>Estimating the number of genes in human genome has been long an important problem in computational biology. With the new conception of considering human as a super-organism, it is also interesting to estimate the number of genes in this human super-organism.<h4>P...
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| Autores principales: | , , , |
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| Formato: | article |
| Lenguaje: | EN |
| Publicado: |
Public Library of Science (PLoS)
2009
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| Materias: | |
| Acceso en línea: | https://doaj.org/article/8e094f57c3414cb7a3f2a00247e6f74e |
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| Sumario: | <h4>Background</h4>Estimating the number of genes in human genome has been long an important problem in computational biology. With the new conception of considering human as a super-organism, it is also interesting to estimate the number of genes in this human super-organism.<h4>Principal findings</h4>We presented our estimation of gene numbers in the human gut bacterial community, the largest microbial community inside the human super-organism. We got 552,700 unique genes from 202 complete human gut bacteria genomes. Then, a novel gene counting model was built to check the total number of genes by combining culture-independent sequence data and those complete genomes. 16S rRNAs were used to construct a three-level tree and different counting methods were introduced for the three levels: strain-to-species, species-to-genus, and genus-and-up. The model estimates that the total number of genes is about 9,000,000 after those with identity percentage of 97% or up were merged.<h4>Conclusion</h4>By combining completed genomes currently available and culture-independent sequencing data, we built a model to estimate the number of genes in human gut bacterial community. The total number of genes is estimated to be about 9 million. Although this number is huge, we believe it is underestimated. This is an initial step to tackle this gene counting problem for the human super-organism. It will still be an open problem in the near future. The list of genomes used in this paper can be found in the supplementary table. |
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