AUTHOR=Pausan Manuela R. , Csorba Cintia , Singer Georg , Till Holger , Schöpf Veronika , Santigli Elisabeth , Klug Barbara , Högenauer Christoph , Blohs Marcus , Moissl-Eichinger Christine TITLE=Exploring the Archaeome: Detection of Archaeal Signatures in the Human Body JOURNAL=Frontiers in Microbiology VOLUME=10 YEAR=2019 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/microbiology/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2019.02796 DOI=10.3389/fmicb.2019.02796 ISSN=1664-302X ABSTRACT=

Due to their fundamentally different biology, archaea are consistently overlooked in conventional microbiome surveys. Using amplicon sequencing, we evaluated methodological set-ups to detect archaea in samples from five different body sites: respiratory tract (nasal cavity), digestive tract (mouth, appendix, and stool) and skin. With optimized protocols, the detection of archaeal ribosomal sequence variants (RSVs) was increased from one (found in currently used, so-called “universal” approach) to 81 RSVs in a representative sample set. The results from this extensive primer-evaluation led to the identification of the primer pair combination 344f-1041R/519F-806R which performed superior for the analysis of the archaeome of gastrointestinal tract, oral cavity and skin. The proposed protocol might not only prove useful for analyzing the human archaeome in more detail but could also be used for other holobiont samples.