Genomic Analysis of Complex Microbial Communities in Wounds.

摘要

The work that we conducted was aimed at moving wound research beyond the limitations of culture-based microbial analyses to enable comprehensive characterization of wound colonization and to fully evaluate its impact on healing. We successfully developed a novel, culture-independent approach for characterizing wound microbiota; we succeeded in applying statistical tools to begin characterizing the impact of antibiotic therapies and diabetes on wound microbiota; we used our novel strategies to define macro-scale spatial variation in chronic wound microbiota; we established research partnerships with MIHS to conduct prospective cohort studies on burn and chronic wounds; we enrolled a total of 71 patients into a prospective study of burn wound colonization and collected over 700 wound samples from these patients; we developed new protocols to isolate bacterial DNA from burn wounds with minimal exogenous DNA contamination; we developed a novel bioinformatics pipeline for identifying robust real time PCR targets for detection and quantification of clinical pathogens; and developed a comprehensive panel of TaqMan assays (n = 108) for detection of extraintestinal virulence factors in E. coli.