Oral microbiomes of patients with infective endocarditis (IE): a comparative pilot study of IE patients, patients at risk for IE and healthy controls
Mougeot et al.
The finding, in our words
This pilot study found that the oral microbiome profiles of patients with infective endocarditis differed significantly from those of at-risk and healthy controls, suggesting that saliva sampling could help identify bacterial species associated with the disease.
A paraphrase to the Library’s standard, never the abstract. The source is one link away and is always the authority.
In a one-week virtual home clinic with 134 participants, 86 per cent returned saliva and 84 per cent returned stool, and most components were feasible and acceptable despite device and logistical challenges. This supports decentralised, patient-centric self-collection of non-blood biospecimens for research.
This study found that a decontamination pipeline using metagenome-assembled genomes improves the accuracy of variant calling from saliva samples, showing superior concordance with blood-derived results compared to conventional methods. These results validate the potential of self-collected oral samples for accurate personal genotyping.
The Guangzhou Nutrition and Health Study integrates 14-day real-time continuous glucose monitoring with multi-omics data, including serum and faecal metabolomes, proteomes, and gut microbiome sequencing, to explore biomarkers and mechanisms of metabolic disease.
A scoping review of 52 studies found most were high-quality RCTs using CGM, metabolomics and microbiome analysis in endurance athletes, yet evidence linking these biomarkers to performance, recovery or long-term health remains insufficient. This gap between biomarker discovery and clinical validation must be closed before these decentralised tools can guide precision nutrition.
Participants preferred the Omnigene and Zymo oral swabs for comfort and ease of use, whilst the Omnigene device yielded the highest median bacterial DNA concentration compared to the other devices. The results indicate that the choice of self-collection device impacts both patient acceptability and DNA yield for oral microbiome analysis.
Rooney et al., Journal of microbiological methods (paywalled) · source ↗