AUTHOR=Oulas Anastasis , Zachariou Margarita , Chasapis Christos T. , Tomazou Marios , Ijaz Umer Z. , Schmartz Georges Pierre , Spyrou George M. , Vlamis-Gardikas Alexios TITLE=Putative Antimicrobial Peptides Within Bacterial Proteomes Affect Bacterial Predominance: A Network Analysis Perspective JOURNAL=Frontiers in Microbiology VOLUME=12 YEAR=2021 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/microbiology/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2021.752674 DOI=10.3389/fmicb.2021.752674 ISSN=1664-302X ABSTRACT=

The predominance of bacterial taxa in the gut, was examined in view of the putative antimicrobial peptide sequences (AMPs) within their proteomes. The working assumption was that compatible bacteria would share homology and thus immunity to their putative AMPs, while competing taxa would have dissimilarities in their proteome-hidden AMPs. A network–based method (“Bacterial Wars”) was developed to handle sequence similarities of predicted AMPs among UniProt-derived protein sequences from different bacterial taxa, while a resulting parameter (“Die” score) suggested which taxa would prevail in a defined microbiome. T he working hypothesis was examined by correlating the calculated Die scores, to the abundance of bacterial taxa from gut microbiomes from different states of health and disease. Eleven publicly available 16S rRNA datasets and a dataset from a full shotgun metagenomics served for the analysis. The overall conclusion was that AMPs encrypted within bacterial proteomes affected the predominance of bacterial taxa in chemospheres.