Team:Dalhousie Halifax NS/Proof
Metagenomic Library Proof Of Concept
Would it work?
Using gut microbes as a "mine" for enzymes using a metagenomic library approach is a fairly novel idea. This concept does raise some questions.
Is it even possible?
How different are microbiomes to begin with, will different animals have different microbiomes?
What enzymes are we likely to find in what animals?
Are the enzymes found in each animal predictable?
These questions guided our proof of concept experiments and allowed us to gather some evidence for our approach. This page will answer the questions raised above and will act to provide some of evidence to the feasibility of our approach.
How did we find evidence?
The Integrated Microbiome Resource at Dalhousie does 16S and metagenomic DNA sequencing and is a bioinformatic hub at the University. With their support we sequenced the 16S rRNA genes found in the environmental DNA extracted from feces of 21 mammals at the Shubenacadie Wildlife Park. With this information we were able to address a few of the questions that were mentioned above. We then chose the porcupine, beaver, arctic wolf and coyote samples to sequence in replicate, and then applied a bioinformatic tool called PICRUSt (Phylogenetic Investigation of Communities by Reconstruction of Unobserved States) to obtain information of microbial gene content found in these fecal samples. These animals were chosen because the beaver microbiome is similar to the porcupine microbiome according to our 16S data, and the arctic wolf and coyote microbiomes are similar to each other but different from the beaver and porcupine microbiomes. Our goal is to use microbial diversity and gene content in fecal samples as an approximation of the microbiomes of the mammals at the wildlife park. With this approximation we can determine what enzymes we are likely to find in the microbiomes of particular animals.
Results
These are the results of our sequencing and bioinformatic analysis separated by section and tool:
Initial 16S Sequencing
