Bacteriophages in Gut Samples From Pediatric Crohn's Disease Patients: Metagenomic Analysis Using 454 Pyrosequencing

Abstract

BACKGROUND: The role of bacteriophage in Crohn's disease (CD) is unknown. This study investigated the abundance of phages in ileal and colonic samples from pediatric CD patients and controls. METHODS: Ileal and colonic biopsies from 6 CD patients, gut wash samples from 3 CD patients, and ileal biopsies from 6 noninflammatory bowel disease patients (controls) were analyzed for the presence of bacteriophage using 454 high-throughput pyrosequencing. A sequence-independent single-primer amplification method was used to amplify viral sequences. RESULTS: A total of 186,143 high quality reads were obtained from the 4 sample populations. Contigs and sequence clusters (generated from unassembled sing..