Inherent bacterial DNA contamination of extraction and sequencing reagents may affect interpretation of microbiota in low bacterial biomass samples

摘要

BackgroundThe advent and use of highly sensitive molecular biology techniques to explore the microbiota and microbiome in environmental and tissue samples have detected the presence of contaminating microbial DNA within reagents. These microbial DNA contaminants may distort taxonomic distributions and relative frequencies in microbial datasets, as well as contribute to erroneous interpretations and identifications.