Analysis of the Lung Microbiome in the “Healthy” Smoker and in COPD

By John R. Erb-Downward, Deborah L. Thompson, M. Han, C. Freeman, Lisa McCloskey, Lindsay A. Schmidt, Vincent B. Young, G. Toews, J. Curtis, B. Sundaram and 2 more. PLoS ONE, 2011

941 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Although culture-independent techniques have shown that the lungs are not sterile, little is known about the lung microbiome in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). We used pyrosequencing of 16S amplicons to analyze the lung microbiome in two ways: first, using bronchoalveolar lavage (BAL) to sample the distal bronchi and air-spaces; and second, by examining multiple discrete tissue sites in the lungs of six subjects removed at the time of transplantation. We performed BAL on three never-smokers (NS) with normal spirometry, seven smokers with normal spirometry (“heathy smokers”, HS), and four subjects with COPD (CS). Bacterial 16 s sequences were found in all subjects, without significant quantitative differences between groups. Both taxonomy-based and taxonomy-independent approaches disclosed heterogeneity in the bacterial communities between HS subjects that was similar to that seen in healthy NS and two mild COPD patients. The moderate and severe COPD patients had very limited community diversity, which was also noted in 28% of the healthy subjects. Both approaches revealed extensive membership overlap between the bacterial communities of the three study groups. No genera were common within a group but unique across groups. Our data suggests the existence of a core pulmonary bacterial microbiome that includes Pseudomonas, Streptococcus, Prevotella, Fusobacterium, Haemophilus, Veillonella, and Porphyromonas. Most strikingly, there were significant micro-anatomic differences in bacterial communities within the same lung of subjects with advanced COPD. These studies are further demonstration of the pulmonary microbiome and highlight global and micro-anatomic changes in these bacterial communities in severe COPD patients.

Subfields: Emergency Medical Services, Molecular Biology, Pulmonary and Respiratory Medicine

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/794f071e6b2f324b8e9c26efb8e9fe994bbb6676

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In Molecular Biology

Citations in the corpus

The Microbiome and the Respiratory Tract (2015, background): “Whereas in asthma even patients with mild disease have detectably altered airway microbiota (4, 78), the airway microbiota of patients with mild and moderate COPD is indistinguishable from those of healthy volunteers (32, 51, 75, 87, 88).”
Topographical continuity of bacterial populations in the healthy human respiratory tract. (2011, background): “Molecularbased studies of the LRT using bronchoscopic collection of BAL or mucosal brushes have reported that airways of healthy individuals contain a characteristic distribution of organisms, often at very high levels (10, 11).”