GBDR: a Bayesian model for precise prediction of pathogenic microorganisms using 16S rRNA gene sequences

Background Recent evidences have suggested that human microorganisms participate in important biological activities in the human body. The dysfunction of host-microbiota interactions could lead to complex human disorders. The knowledge on host-microbiota interactions can provide valuable insights into understanding the pathological mechanism of diseases. However, it is time-consuming and costly to identify the disorder-specific microbes from the biological haystack merely by routine wet-lab experiments. With the developments in next-generation sequencing and omics-based trials, it is imperative to develop computational prediction models for predicting microbe-disease associations on a large scale. Results Based on the known microbe-disease associations derived from the Human Microbe-Disease Association Database (HMDAD), the proposed model shows reliable performance with high values of the area under ROC curve (AUC) of 0.9456 and 0.8866 in leave-one-out cross validations and five-fold cross validations, respectively. In case studies of colorectal carcinoma, 80% out of the top-20 predicted microbes have been experimentally confirmed via published literatures. Conclusion Based on the assumption that functionally similar microbes tend to share the similar interaction patterns with human diseases, we here propose a group based computational model of Bayesian disease-oriented ranking to prioritize the most potential microbes associating with various human diseases. Based on the sequence information of genes, two computational approaches (BLAST+ and MEGA 7) are leveraged to measure the microbe-microbe similarity from different perspectives. The disease-disease similarity is calculated by capturing the hierarchy information from the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) data. The experimental results illustrate the accuracy and effectiveness of the proposed model. This work is expected to facilitate the characterization and identification of promising microbial biomarkers.

Automated summary

Recent evidences have shown the importance of host-microbiota interactions in the human body, and understanding these interactions can provide valuable insights into the pathological mechanisms of diseases. However, identifying disorder-specific microbes through wet-lab experiments is time-consuming and costly. This study aims to develop a computational prediction model to predict microbe-disease associations on a large scale. The proposed model shows reliable performance and has the potential to facilitate the identification of microbial biomarkers.