Project caries services do not include NGS sequencing of the V1V3 region of the 16S rRNA gene amplicons from the samples. First and foremost, please
download this report.
These links will expire after 60 days. We cannot guarantee the availability of your data after 60 days.
Full Bioinformatics analysis service was requested.
We provide many downstream analyses such as taxonomy assignment, alpha and beta diversity analyses, and differential abundance analysis.
For taxonomy assignment, most informative would be the taxonomy barplots. We provide an interactive barplots to show the relative abundance of microbes at different taxonomy levels (from Phylum to species) that you can choose.
If you specify which groups of samples you want to compare for differential abundance, we provide both ANCOM and LEfSe differential abundance analysis.
The complete report of your project, including all links in this report, can be downloaded by clicking the link provided below. The downloaded file is a compressed ZIP file and once unzipped, open the file “REPORT.html” (may only shown as "REPORT" in your computer) by double clicking it. Your default web browser will open it and you will see the exact content of this report.
Please download and save the file to your computer storage device. The download link will expire after 60 days upon your receiving of this report.
Complete report download link:
To view the report, please follow the following steps:
1.
Download the .zip file from the report link above.
2.
Extract all the contents of the downloaded .zip file to your desktop.
3.
Open the extracted folder and find the "REPORT.html" (may shown as only "REPORT").
4.
Open (double-clicking) the REPORT.html file. Your default browser will open the top age of the complete report. Within the
report, there are links to view all the analyses performed for the project.
The species-level, open-reference 16S rRNA NGS reads taxonomy assignment pipeline
Version 20210310
1. Raw sequences reads in FASTA format were BLASTN-searched against a combined set of 16S rRNA reference sequences.
It consists of MOMD (version 0.1), the HOMD (version 15.2 http://www.homd.org/index.php?name=seqDownload&file&type=R ),
HOMD 16S rRNA RefSeq Extended Version 1.1 (EXT), GreenGene Gold (GG)
(http://greengenes.lbl.gov/Download/Sequence_Data/Fasta_data_files/gold_strains_gg16S_aligned.fasta.gz) ,
and the NCBI 16S rRNA reference sequence set (https://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/blast/db/16S_ribosomal_RNA.tar.gz).
These sequences were screened and combined to remove short sequences (<1000nt), chimera, duplicated and sub-sequences,
as well as sequences with poor taxonomy annotation (e.g., without species information).
This process resulted in 1,015 from HOMD V15.22, 495 from EXT, 3,940 from GG and 18,044 from NCBI, a total of 25,120 sequences.
Altogether these sequence represent a total of 15,601 oral and non-oral microbial species.
The NCBI BLASTN version 2.7.1+ (Zhang et al, 2000) was used with the default parameters.
Reads with ≥ 98% sequence identity to the matched reference and ≥ 90% alignment length
(i.e., ≥ 90% of the read length that was aligned to the reference and was used to calculate
the sequence percent identity) were classified based on the taxonomy of the reference sequence
with highest sequence identity. If a read matched with reference sequences representing
more than one species with equal percent identity and alignment length, it was subject
to chimera checking with USEARCH program version v8.1.1861 (Edgar 2010). Non-chimeric reads with multi-species
best hits were considered valid and were assigned with a unique species
notation (e.g., spp) denoting unresolvable multiple species.
2. Unassigned reads (i.e., reads with < 98% identity or < 90% alignment length) were pooled together and reads < 200 bases were
removed. The remaining reads were subject to the de novo
operational taxonomy unit (OTU) calling and chimera checking using the USEARCH program version v8.1.1861 (Edgar 2010).
The de novo OTU calling and chimera checking was done using 98% as the sequence identity cutoff, i.e., the species-level OTU.
The output of this step produced species-level de novo clustered OTUs with 98% identity.
Representative reads from each of the OTUs/species were then BLASTN-searched
against the same reference sequence set again to determine the closest species for
these potential novel species. These potential novel species were pooled together with the reads that were signed to specie-level in
the previous step, for down-stream analyses.
Reference:
Edgar RC. Search and clustering orders of magnitude faster than BLAST.
Bioinformatics. 2010 Oct 1;26(19):2460-1. doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btq461. Epub 2010 Aug 12. PubMed PMID: 20709691.
3. Designations used in the taxonomy:
1) Taxonomy levels are indicated by these prefixes:
k__: domain/kingdom
p__: phylum
c__: class
o__: order
f__: family
g__: genus
s__: species
Example:
k__Bacteria;p__Firmicutes;c__Clostridia;o__Clostridiales;f__Lachnospiraceae;g__Blautia;s__faecis
2) Unique level identified – known species:
k__Bacteria;p__Firmicutes;c__Clostridia;o__Clostridiales;f__Lachnospiraceae;g__Roseburia;s__hominis
The above example shows some reads match to a single species (all levels are unique)
3) Non-unique level identified – known species:
k__Bacteria;p__Firmicutes;c__Clostridia;o__Clostridiales;f__Lachnospiraceae;g__Roseburia;s__multispecies_spp123_3
The above example “s__multispecies_spp123_3” indicates certain reads equally match to 3 species of the
genus Roseburia; the “spp123” is a temporally assigned species ID.
k__Bacteria;p__Firmicutes;c__Clostridia;o__Clostridiales;f__Lachnospiraceae;g__multigenus;s__multispecies_spp234_5
The above example indicates certain reads match equally to 5 different species, which belong to multiple genera.;
the “spp234” is a temporally assigned species ID.
4) Unique level identified – unknown species, potential novel species:
k__Bacteria;p__Firmicutes;c__Clostridia;o__Clostridiales;f__Lachnospiraceae;g__Roseburia;s__ hominis_nov_97%
The above example indicates that some reads have no match to any of the reference sequences with
sequence identity ≥ 98% and percent coverage (alignment length) ≥ 98% as well. However this groups
of reads (actually the representative read from a de novo OTU) has 96% percent identity to
Roseburia hominis, thus this is a potential novel species, closest to Roseburia hominis.
(But they are not the same species).
5) Multiple level identified – unknown species, potential novel species:
k__Bacteria;p__Firmicutes;c__Clostridia;o__Clostridiales;f__Lachnospiraceae;g__Roseburia;s__ multispecies_sppn123_3_nov_96%
The above example indicates that some reads have no match to any of the reference sequences
with sequence identity ≥ 98% and percent coverage (alignment length) ≥ 98% as well.
However this groups of reads (actually the representative read from a de novo OTU)
has 96% percent identity equally to 3 species in Roseburia. Thus this is no single
closest species, instead this group of reads match equally to multiple species at 96%.
Since they have passed chimera check so they represent a novel species. “sppn123” is a
temporary ID for this potential novel species.
4. The taxonomy assignment algorithm is illustrated in this flow char below:
Read Taxonomy Assignment - Result Summary *
Code
Category
MPC=0% (>=1 read)
MPC=0.01%(>=637 reads)
A
Total reads
7,347,413
7,347,413
B
Total assigned reads
6,378,745
6,378,745
C
Assigned reads in species with read count < MPC
0
54,202
D
Assigned reads in samples with read count < 500
0
0
E
Total samples
66
66
F
Samples with reads >= 500
66
66
G
Samples with reads < 500
0
0
H
Total assigned reads used for analysis (B-C-D)
6,378,745
6,324,543
I
Reads assigned to single species
5,628,811
5,608,127
J
Reads assigned to multiple species
445,435
441,329
K
Reads assigned to novel species
304,499
275,087
L
Total number of species
1,805
158
M
Number of single species
571
119
N
Number of multi-species
59
8
O
Number of novel species
1,175
31
P
Total unassigned reads
968,668
968,668
Q
Chimeric reads
26,667
26,667
R
Reads without BLASTN hits
336
336
S
Others: short, low quality, singletons, etc.
941,665
941,665
A=B+P=C+D+H+Q+R+S
E=F+G
B=C+D+H
H=I+J+K
L=M+N+O
P=Q+R+S
* MPC = Minimal percent (of all assigned reads) read count per species, species with read count < MPC were removed.
* Samples with reads < 500 were removed from downstream analyses.
* The assignment result from MPC=0.1% was used in the downstream analyses.
Read Taxonomy Assignment - ASV Species-Level Read Counts Table
This table shows the read counts for each sample (columns) and each species identified based on the ASV sequences.
The downstream analyses were based on this table.
The species listed in the table has full taxonomy and a dynamically assigned species ID specific to this report.
When some reads match with the reference sequences of more than one species equally (i.e., same percent identiy and alignmnet coverage),
they can't be assigned to a particular species. Instead, they are assigned to multiple species with the species notaton
"s__multispecies_spp2_2". In this notation, spp2 is the dynamic ID assigned to these reads that hit multiple sequences and the "_2"
at the end of the notation means there are two species in the spp2.
You can look up which species are included in the multi-species assignment, in this table below:
Another type of notation is "s__multispecies_sppn2_2", in which the "n" in the sppn2 means it's a potential novel species because all the reads in this species
have < 98% idenity to any of the reference sequences. They were grouped together based on de novo OTU clustering at 98% identity cutoff. And then
a representative sequence was chosed to BLASTN search against the reference database to find the closest match (but will still be < 98%). This representative
sequence also matched equally to more than one species, hence the "spp" was given in the label.
In ecology, alpha diversity (α-diversity) is the mean species diversity in sites or habitats at a local scale.
The term was introduced by R. H. Whittaker[1][2] together with the terms beta diversity (β-diversity)
and gamma diversity (γ-diversity). Whittaker's idea was that the total species diversity in a landscape
(gamma diversity) is determined by two different things, the mean species diversity in sites or habitats
at a more local scale (alpha diversity) and the differentiation among those habitats (beta diversity).
Diversity measures are affected by the sampling depth. Rarefaction is a technique to assess species richness from the results of sampling. Rarefaction allows
the calculation of species richness for a given number of individual samples, based on the construction
of so-called rarefaction curves. This curve is a plot of the number of species as a function of the
number of samples. Rarefaction curves generally grow rapidly at first, as the most common species are found,
but the curves plateau as only the rarest species remain to be sampled.
The two main factors taken into account when measuring diversity are richness and evenness.
Richness is a measure of the number of different kinds of organisms present in a particular area.
Evenness compares the similarity of the population size of each of the species present. There are
many different ways to measure the richness and evenness. These measurements are called "estimators" or "indices".
Below is a diversity of 3 commonly used indices showing the values for all the samples (dots) and in groups (boxes).
Alpha Diversity Box Plots for All Groups
Alpha Diversity Box Plots for Individual Comparisons
Comparison 1
Saliva vs SHI vs Mock_community vs Healthy_inoculum vs Caries_inoculum
To test whether the alpha diversity among different comparison groups are different statisticall, we use the Kruskal Wallis H test
provided the "alpha-group-significance" fucntion in the QIIME 2 diversity package. Kruskal Wallis H test is the non parametric alternative
to the One Way ANOVA. Non parametric means that the test doesn’t assume your data comes from a particular distribution. The H test is used
when the assumptions for ANOVA aren’t met (like the assumption of normality). It is sometimes called the one-way ANOVA on ranks,
as the ranks of the data values are used in the test rather than the actual data points. The test determines whether the medians of two
or more groups are different.
Below are the Kruskal Wallis H test results for each comparison based on three different alpha diversity measures: 1) Observed species (features),
2) Shannon index, and 3) Simpson index.
Comparison 1.
Saliva vs SHI vs Mock_community vs Healthy_inoculum vs Caries_inoculum
Beta diversity compares the similarity (or dissimilarity) of microbial profiles between different
groups of samples. There are many different similarity/dissimilarity metrics.
In general, they can be quantitative (using sequence abundance, e.g., Bray-Curtis or weighted UniFrac)
or binary (considering only presence-absence of sequences, e.g., binary Jaccard or unweighted UniFrac).
They can be even based on phylogeny (e.g., UniFrac metrics) or not (non-UniFrac metrics, such as Bray-Curtis, etc.).
For microbiome studies, species profiles of samples can be compared with the Bray-Curtis dissimilarity,
which is based on the count data type. The pair-wise Bray-Curtis dissimilarity matrix of all samples can then be
subject to either multi-dimensional scaling (MDS, also known as PCoA) or non-metric MDS (NMDS).
MDS/PCoA is a
scaling or ordination method that starts with a matrix of similarities or dissimilarities
between a set of samples and aims to produce a low-dimensional graphical plot of the data
in such a way that distances between points in the plot are close to original dissimilarities.
NMDS is similar to MDS, however it does not use the dissimilarities data, instead it converts them into
the ranks and use these ranks in the calculation.
In our beta diversity analysis, Bray-Curtis dissimilarity matrix was first calculated and then plotted by the PCoA and
NMDS separately. Below are beta diveristy results for all groups together:
NMDS and PCoA Plots for All Groups
The above PCoA and NMDS plots are based on count data. The count data can also be transformed into centered log ratio (CLR)
for each species. The CLR data is no longer count data and cannot be used in Bray-Curtis dissimilarity calculation. Instead
CLR can be compared with Euclidean distances. When CLR data are compared by Euclidean distance, the distance is also called
Aitchison distance.
Below are the NMDS and PCoA plots of the Aitchison distances of the samples:
NMDS and PCoA Plots for Individual Comparisons
Comparison No.
Comparison Name
NMDA
PCoA
Bray-Curtis
CLR Euclidean
Bray-Curtis
CLR Euclidean
Comparison 1
Saliva vs SHI vs Mock_community vs Healthy_inoculum vs Caries_inoculum
Interactive 3D PCoA Plots - Bray-Curtis Dissimilarity
Interactive 3D PCoA Plots - Euclidean Distance
Interactive 3D PCoA Plots - Correlation Coefficients
Group Significance of Beta-diversity Indices
To test whether the between-group dissimilarities are significantly greater than the within-group dissimilarities,
the "beta-group-significance" function provided in the QIIME 2 "diversity" package was used with PERMANOVA
(permutational multivariate analysis of variance) chosen s the group significan testing method.
Three beta diversity matrics were used: 1) Bray–Curtis dissimilarity 2) Correlation coefficient matrix , and 3) Aitchison distance
(Euclidean distance between clr-transformed compositions).
Comparison 1.
Saliva vs SHI vs Mock_community vs Healthy_inoculum vs Caries_inoculum
16S rRNA next generation sequencing (NGS) generates a fixed number of reads that reflect the proportion of different
species in a sample, i.e., the relative abundance of species, instead of the absolute abundance.
In Mathematics, measurements involving probabilities, proportions, percentages, and ppm can all
be thought of as compositional data. This makes the microbiome read count data “compositional”
(Gloor et al, 2017). In general, compositional data represent parts of a whole which only
carry relative information (http://www.compositionaldata.com/).
The problem of microbiome data being compositional arises when comparing two groups of samples for
identifying “differentially abundant” species. A species with the same absolute abundance between two
conditions, its relative abundances in the two conditions (e.g., percent abundance) can become different
if the relative abundance of other species change greatly. This problem can lead to incorrect conclusion
in terms of differential abundance for microbial species in the samples.
When studying differential abundance (DA), the current better approach is to transform the read count
data into log ratio data. The ratios are calculated between read counts of all species in a sample to
a “reference” count (e.g., mean read count of the sample). The log ratio data allow the detection of DA
species without being affected by percentage bias mentioned above
In this report, a compositional DA analysis tool “ANCOM” (analysis of composition of microbiomes)
was used. ANCOM transforms the count data into log-ratios and thus is more suitable for comparing
the composition of microbiomes in two or more populations. "ANCOM" generates a table of features with
W-statistics and whether the null hypothesis is rejected. The “W” is the W-statistic, or number of
features that a single feature is tested to be significantly different against. Hence the higher the "W"
the more statistical sifgnificane that a feature/species is differentially abundant.
References:
Gloor GB, Macklaim JM, Pawlowsky-Glahn V, Egozcue JJ. Microbiome Datasets Are Compositional: And This Is Not Optional. Front Microbiol.
2017 Nov 15;8:2224. doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2017.02224. PMID: 29187837; PMCID: PMC5695134.
Mandal S, Van Treuren W, White RA, Eggesbø M, Knight R, Peddada SD. Analysis of composition of
microbiomes: a novel method for studying microbial composition. Microb Ecol Health Dis.
2015 May 29;26:27663. doi: 10.3402/mehd.v26.27663. PMID: 26028277; PMCID: PMC4450248.
Lin H, Peddada SD. Analysis of compositions of microbiomes with bias correction.
Nat Commun. 2020 Jul 14;11(1):3514. doi: 10.1038/s41467-020-17041-7.
PMID: 32665548; PMCID: PMC7360769.
Starting with version V1.2, we also include the results of ANCOM-BC (Analysis of Compositions of
Microbiomes with Bias Correction) (Lin and Peddada 2020). ANCOM-BC is an updated version of "ANCOM" that:
(a) provides statistically valid test with appropriate p-values,
(b) provides confidence intervals for differential abundance of each taxon,
(c) controls the False Discovery Rate (FDR),
(d) maintains adequate power, and
(e) is computationally simple to implement.
The bias correction (BC) addresses a challenging problem of the bias introduced by differences in
the sampling fractions across samples. This bias has been a major hurdle in performing DA analysis of microbiome data.
ANCOM-BC estimates the unknown sampling fractions and corrects the bias induced by their differences among samples.
The absolute abundance data are modeled using a linear regression framework.
References:
Lin H, Peddada SD. Analysis of compositions of microbiomes with bias correction.
Nat Commun. 2020 Jul 14;11(1):3514. doi: 10.1038/s41467-020-17041-7.
PMID: 32665548; PMCID: PMC7360769.
LEfSe (Linear Discriminant Analysis Effect Size) is an alternative method to find "organisms, genes, or
pathways that consistently explain the differences between two or more microbial communities" (Segata et al., 2011).
Specifically, LEfSe uses rank-based Kruskal-Wallis (KW) sum-rank test to detect features with significant
differential (relative) abundance with respect to the class of interest. Since it is rank-based, instead of proportional based,
the differential species identified among the comparison groups is less biased (than percent abundance based).
Reference:
Segata N, Izard J, Waldron L, Gevers D, Miropolsky L, Garrett WS, Huttenhower C. Metagenomic biomarker discovery and explanation. Genome Biol. 2011 Jun 24;12(6):R60. doi: 10.1186/gb-2011-12-6-r60. PMID: 21702898; PMCID: PMC3218848.
Saliva vs SHI vs Mock_community vs Healthy_inoculum vs Caries_inoculum
To analyze the co-occurrence or co-exclusion between microbial species among different samples, network correlation
analysis tools are usually used for this purpose. However, microbiome count data are compositional. If count data are normalized to the total number of counts in the
sample, the data become not independent and traditional statistical metrics (e.g., correlation) for the detection
of specie-species relationships can lead to spurious results. In addition, sequencing-based studies typically
measure hundreds of OTUs (species) on few samples; thus, inference of OTU-OTU association networks is severely
under-powered. Here we use SPIEC-EASI (SParse InversECovariance Estimation
for Ecological Association Inference), a statistical method for the inference of microbial
ecological networks from amplicon sequencing datasets that addresses both of these issues (Kurtz et al., 2015).
SPIEC-EASI combines data transformations developed for compositional data analysis with a graphical model
inference framework that assumes the underlying ecological association network is sparse. SPIEC-EASI provides
two algorithms for network inferencing – 1) Meinshausen-Bühlmann's neighborhood selection (MB method) and inverse covariance selection
(GLASSO method, i.e., graphical least absolute shrinkage and selection operator). This is fundamentally distinct from SparCC, which essentially estimate pairwise correlations. In addition
to these two methods, we provide the results of a third method - SparCC (Sparse Correlations for Compositional Data)(Friedman & Alm 2012), which
is also a method for inferring correlations from compositional data. SparCC estimates the linear Pearson correlations between
the log-transformed components.
References:
Kurtz ZD, Müller CL, Miraldi ER, Littman DR, Blaser MJ, Bonneau RA. Sparse and compositionally robust inference of microbial ecological networks. PLoS Comput Biol. 2015 May 7;11(5):e1004226. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1004226. PMID: 25950956; PMCID: PMC4423992.
