@article {794, title = {Case report: Analysis of phage therapy failure in a patient with a Pseudomonas aeruginosa prosthetic vascular graft infection}, journal = {Front Med (Lausanne)}, volume = {10}, year = {2023}, month = {2023}, pages = {1199657}, abstract = {

Clinical case of a patient with a multidrug-resistant prosthetic vascular graft infection which was treated with a cocktail of phages (PT07, 14/01, and PNM) in combination with ceftazidime-avibactam (CZA). After the application of the phage treatment and in absence of antimicrobial therapy, a new bloodstream infection (BSI) with a septic residual limb metastasis occurred, now involving a wild-type strain being susceptible to {\ss}-lactams and quinolones. Clinical strains were analyzed by microbiology and whole genome sequencing techniques. In relation with phage administration, the clinical isolates of before phage therapy (HE2011471) and post phage therapy (HE2105886) showed a clonal relationship but with important genomic changes which could be involved in the resistance to this therapy. Finally, phenotypic studies showed a decrease in Minimum Inhibitory Concentration (MIC) to {\ss}-lactams and quinolones as well as an increase of the biofilm production and phage resistant mutants in the clinical isolate of post phage therapy.

}, doi = {10.3389/fmed.2023.1199657}, url = {https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10235614/}, author = {Blasco, Lucia and L{\'o}pez-Hern{\'a}ndez, Inmaculada and Rodr{\'\i}guez-Fern{\'a}ndez, Miguel and Perez-Florido, Javier and Casimiro-Soriguer, Carlos S} } @article {766, title = {Detection of High Level of Co-Infection and the Emergence of Novel SARS CoV-2 Delta-Omicron and Omicron-Omicron Recombinants in the Epidemiological Surveillance of Andalusia.}, journal = {Int J Mol Sci}, volume = {24}, year = {2023}, month = {2023 Jan 26}, abstract = {

Recombination is an evolutionary strategy to quickly acquire new viral properties inherited from the parental lineages. The systematic survey of the SARS-CoV-2 genome sequences of the Andalusian genomic surveillance strategy has allowed the detection of an unexpectedly high number of co-infections, which constitute the ideal scenario for the emergence of new recombinants. Whole genome sequence of SARS-CoV-2 has been carried out as part of the genomic surveillance programme. Sample sources included the main hospitals in the Andalusia region. In addition to the increase of co-infections and known recombinants, three novel SARS-CoV-2 delta-omicron and omicron-omicron recombinant variants with two break points have been detected. Our observations document an epidemiological scenario in which co-infection and recombination are detected more frequently. Finally, we describe a family case in which co-infection is followed by the detection of a recombinant made from the two co-infecting variants. This increased number of recombinants raises the risk of emergence of recombinant variants with increased transmissibility and pathogenicity.

}, issn = {1422-0067}, doi = {10.3390/ijms24032419}, author = {Perez-Florido, Javier and Casimiro-Soriguer, Carlos S and Ortuno, Francisco and Fernandez-Rueda, Jose L and Aguado, Andrea and Lara, Mar{\'\i}a and Riazzo, Cristina and Rodriguez-Iglesias, Manuel A and Camacho-Martinez, Pedro and Merino-Diaz, Laura and Pupo-Ledo, Inmaculada and de Salazar, Adolfo and Vi{\~n}uela, Laura and Fuentes, Ana and Chueca, Natalia and Garc{\'\i}a, Federico and Dopazo, Joaquin and Lepe, Jose A} } @article {762, title = {Assessing the Impact of SARS-CoV-2 Lineages and Mutations on Patient Survival.}, journal = {Viruses}, volume = {14}, year = {2022}, month = {2022 Aug 27}, abstract = {

OBJECTIVES: More than two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, SARS-CoV-2 still remains a global public health problem. Successive waves of infection have produced new SARS-CoV-2 variants with new mutations for which the impact on COVID-19 severity and patient survival is uncertain.

METHODS: A total of 764 SARS-CoV-2 genomes, sequenced from COVID-19 patients, hospitalized from 19th February 2020 to 30 April 2021, along with their clinical data, were used for survival analysis.

RESULTS: A significant association of B.1.1.7, the alpha lineage, with patient mortality (log hazard ratio (LHR) = 0.51, C.I. = [0.14,0.88]) was found upon adjustment by all the covariates known to affect COVID-19 prognosis. Moreover, survival analysis of mutations in the SARS-CoV-2 genome revealed 27 of them were significantly associated with higher mortality of patients. Most of these mutations were located in the genes coding for the S, ORF8, and N proteins.

CONCLUSIONS: This study illustrates how a combination of genomic and clinical data can provide solid evidence for the impact of viral lineage on patient survival.

}, keywords = {COVID-19, Genome, Viral, Humans, mutation, Pandemics, Phylogeny, SARS-CoV-2}, issn = {1999-4915}, doi = {10.3390/v14091893}, author = {Loucera, Carlos and Perez-Florido, Javier and Casimiro-Soriguer, Carlos S and Ortuno, Francisco M and Carmona, Rosario and Bostelmann, Gerrit and Mart{\'\i}nez-Gonz{\'a}lez, L Javier and Mu{\~n}oyerro-Mu{\~n}iz, Dolores and Villegas, Rom{\'a}n and Rodr{\'\i}guez-Ba{\~n}o, Jes{\'u}s and Romero-G{\'o}mez, Manuel and Lorusso, Nicola and Garcia-Le{\'o}n, Javier and Navarro-Mar{\'\i}, Jose M and Camacho-Martinez, Pedro and Merino-Diaz, Laura and Salazar, Adolfo de and Vi{\~n}uela, Laura and Lepe, Jose A and Garc{\'\i}a, Federico and Dopazo, Joaquin} } @article {752, title = {Towards a metagenomics machine learning interpretable model for understanding the transition from adenoma to colorectal cancer.}, journal = {Sci Rep}, volume = {12}, year = {2022}, month = {2022 Jan 10}, pages = {450}, abstract = {

Gut microbiome is gaining interest because of its links with several diseases, including colorectal cancer (CRC), as well as the possibility of being used to obtain non-intrusive predictive disease biomarkers. Here we performed a meta-analysis of 1042 fecal metagenomic samples from seven publicly available studies. We used an interpretable machine learning approach based on functional profiles, instead of the conventional taxonomic profiles, to produce a highly accurate predictor of CRC with better precision than those of previous proposals. Moreover, this approach is also able to discriminate samples with adenoma, which makes this approach very promising for CRC prevention by detecting early stages in which intervention is easier and more effective. In addition, interpretable machine learning methods allow extracting features relevant for the classification, which reveals basic molecular mechanisms accounting for the changes undergone by the microbiome functional landscape in the transition from healthy gut to adenoma and CRC conditions. Functional profiles have demonstrated superior accuracy in predicting CRC and adenoma conditions than taxonomic profiles and additionally, in a context of explainable machine learning, provide useful hints on the molecular mechanisms operating in the microbiota behind these conditions.

}, issn = {2045-2322}, doi = {10.1038/s41598-021-04182-y}, author = {Casimiro-Soriguer, Carlos S and Loucera, Carlos and Pe{\~n}a-Chilet, Maria and Dopazo, Joaquin} } @article {744, title = {Highly accurate whole-genome imputation of SARS-CoV-2 from partial or low-quality sequences.}, journal = {Gigascience}, volume = {10}, year = {2021}, month = {2021 12 02}, abstract = {

BACKGROUND: The current SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has emphasized the utility of viral whole-genome sequencing in the surveillance and control of the pathogen. An unprecedented ongoing global initiative is producing hundreds of thousands of sequences worldwide. However, the complex circumstances in which viruses are sequenced, along with the demand of urgent results, causes a high rate of incomplete and, therefore, useless sequences. Viral sequences evolve in the context of a complex phylogeny and different positions along the genome are in linkage disequilibrium. Therefore, an imputation method would be able to predict missing positions from the available sequencing data.

RESULTS: We have developed the impuSARS application, which takes advantage of the enormous number of SARS-CoV-2 genomes available, using a reference panel containing 239,301 sequences, to produce missing data imputation in viral genomes. ImpuSARS was tested in a wide range of conditions (continuous fragments, amplicons or sparse individual positions missing), showing great fidelity when reconstructing the original sequences, recovering the lineage with a 100\% precision for almost all the lineages, even in very poorly covered genomes (<20\%).

CONCLUSIONS: Imputation can improve the pace of SARS-CoV-2 sequencing production by recovering many incomplete or low-quality sequences that would be otherwise discarded. ImpuSARS can be incorporated in any primary data processing pipeline for SARS-CoV-2 whole-genome sequencing.

}, keywords = {Genome, Viral, Phylogeny, SARS-CoV-2, Whole Genome Sequencing}, issn = {2047-217X}, doi = {10.1093/gigascience/giab078}, author = {Ortuno, Francisco M and Loucera, Carlos and Casimiro-Soriguer, Carlos S and Lepe, Jose A and Camacho Martinez, Pedro and Merino Diaz, Laura and de Salazar, Adolfo and Chueca, Natalia and Garc{\'\i}a, Federico and Perez-Florido, Javier and Dopazo, Joaquin} } @article {719, title = {Taxonomic variations in the gut microbiome of gout patients with and without tophi might have a functional impact on urate metabolism.}, journal = {Mol Med}, volume = {27}, year = {2021}, month = {2021 05 24}, pages = {50}, abstract = {

OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the taxonomic composition of the gut microbiome in gout patients with and without tophi formation, and predict bacterial functions that might have an impact on urate metabolism.

METHODS: Hypervariable V3-V4 regions of the bacterial 16S rRNA gene from fecal samples of gout patients with and without tophi (n = 33 and n = 25, respectively) were sequenced and compared to fecal samples from 53 healthy controls. We explored predictive functional profiles using bioinformatics in order to identify differences in taxonomy and metabolic pathways.

RESULTS: We identified a microbiome characterized by the lowest richness and a higher abundance of Phascolarctobacterium, Bacteroides, Akkermansia, and Ruminococcus_gnavus_group genera in patients with gout without tophi when compared to controls. The Proteobacteria phylum and the Escherichia-Shigella genus were more abundant in patients with tophaceous gout than in controls. Fold change analysis detected nine genera enriched in healthy controls compared to gout groups (Bifidobacterium, Butyricicoccus, Oscillobacter, Ruminococcaceae_UCG_010, Lachnospiraceae_ND2007_group, Haemophilus, Ruminococcus_1, Clostridium_sensu_stricto_1, and Ruminococcaceae_UGC_013). We found that the core microbiota of both gout groups shared Bacteroides caccae, Bacteroides stercoris ATCC 43183, and Bacteroides coprocola DSM 17136. These bacteria might perform functions linked to one-carbon metabolism, nucleotide binding, amino acid biosynthesis, and purine biosynthesis. Finally, we observed differences in key bacterial enzymes involved in urate synthesis, degradation, and elimination.

CONCLUSION: Our findings revealed that taxonomic variations in the gut microbiome of gout patients with and without tophi might have a functional impact on urate metabolism.

}, keywords = {Biodiversity, Computational Biology, Dysbiosis, Gastrointestinal Microbiome, Gout, Humans, Metagenome, metagenomics, Protein Interaction Mapping, Protein Interaction Maps, Uric Acid}, issn = {1528-3658}, doi = {10.1186/s10020-021-00311-5}, author = {M{\'e}ndez-Salazar, Eder Orlando and V{\'a}zquez-Mellado, Janitzia and Casimiro-Soriguer, Carlos S and Dopazo, Joaquin and Cubuk, Cankut and Zamudio-Cuevas, Yessica and Francisco-Balderas, Adriana and Mart{\'\i}nez-Flores, Karina and Fern{\'a}ndez-Torres, Javier and Lozada-P{\'e}rez, Carlos and Pineda, Carlos and S{\'a}nchez-Gonz{\'a}lez, Austreberto and Silveira, Luis H and Burguete-Garc{\'\i}a, Ana I and Orbe-Orihuela, Citlalli and Lagunas-Mart{\'\i}nez, Alfredo and Vazquez-Gomez, Alonso and L{\'o}pez-Reyes, Alberto and Palacios-Gonz{\'a}lez, Berenice and Mart{\'\i}nez-Nava, Gabriela Ang{\'e}lica} } @article {672, title = {Antibiotic resistance and metabolic profiles as functional biomarkers that accurately predict the geographic origin of city metagenomics samples.}, journal = {Biol Direct}, volume = {14}, year = {2019}, month = {2019 08 20}, pages = {15}, abstract = {

BACKGROUND: The availability of hundreds of city microbiome profiles allows the development of increasingly accurate predictors of the origin of a sample based on its microbiota composition. Typical microbiome studies involve the analysis of bacterial abundance profiles.

RESULTS: Here we use a transformation of the conventional bacterial strain or gene abundance profiles to functional profiles that account for bacterial metabolism and other cell functionalities. These profiles are used as features for city classification in a machine learning algorithm that allows the extraction of the most relevant features for the classification.

CONCLUSIONS: We demonstrate here that the use of functional profiles not only predict accurately the most likely origin of a sample but also to provide an interesting functional point of view of the biogeography of the microbiota. Interestingly, we show how cities can be classified based on the observed profile of antibiotic resistances.

REVIEWERS: Open peer review: Reviewed by Jin Zhuang Dou, Jing Zhou, Torsten Semmler and Eran Elhaik.

}, keywords = {biomarkers, Cities, Drug Resistance, Microbial, Machine Learning, Metabolome, Metagenome, metagenomics, Microbiota}, issn = {1745-6150}, doi = {10.1186/s13062-019-0246-9}, author = {Casimiro-Soriguer, Carlos S and Loucera, Carlos and Perez Florido, Javier and L{\'o}pez-L{\'o}pez, Daniel and Dopazo, Joaquin} }