Lung infections play a critical role in cystic fibrosis (CF) pathogenesis. CF respiratory tract is now considered to be a polymicrobial niche and advances in high-throughput sequencing allowed to analyze its microbiota and mycobiota. However, no NGS studies until now have characterized both communities during CF pulmonary exacerbation (CFPE). Thirty-three sputa isolated from patients with and without CFPE were used for metagenomic high-throughput sequencing targeting 16S and ITS2 regions of bacterial and fungal rRNA. We built inter-kingdom network and adapted Phy-Lasso method to highlight correlations in compositional data. The decline in respiratory function was associated with a decrease in bacterial diversity. The inter-kingdom network revealed three main clusters organized around Aspergillus, Candida, and Scedosporium genera. Using Phy-Lasso method, we identified Aspergillus and Malassezia as relevantly associated with CFPE, and Scedosporium plus Pseudomonas with a decline in lung function. We corroborated in vitro the cross-domain interactions between Aspergillus and Streptococcus predicted by the correlation network. For the first time, we included documented mycobiome data into a version of the ecological Climax/Attack model that opens new lines of thoughts about the physiopathology of CF lung disease and future perspectives to improve its therapeutic management. Lung infections play a critical role in cystic fibrosis (CF) pathogenesis where they can lead to significant acute decrease of lung function, known as CF pulmonary exacerbation (CFPE). Developments of next-generation sequencing (NGS) approaches allowed us to understand microbiome composition that can contribute to lung physiopathology in both healthy individuals and patients with lung disease. More recently, NGS together with advances into statistical network inference tools allowed to analyze the microbial airway communities, appreciate the inter-kingdom equilibrium of respiratory floras, and therefore develop understanding of microbial communities as a whole 1-7. Acute CFPEs represent major clinical events that significantly decline the lung function, contribute to disease progression and require adapted, prompt anti-infectious treatment 8-11. Omics approaches confirmed associations between bacterial community and exacerbation 12-20. Apart from bacteria that are well known agents causing dramatic recurrent CFPEs, respiratory viruses have been recently found to be associated with CFPE, independently
We demonstrate that Pneumocystis reaches a >90% prevalence
peak at 3–5 months of age and associates with increased mucus (MUC5AC), suggesting
airway epithelium stimulation in infants during this age range. Host ability to clear
mucus would determine pathogenic expression.
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