Background
Fungal load quantification is a critical component of fungal community analyses. Limitation of current approaches for quantifying the fungal component in the human microbiome suggests the need for new broad-coverage techniques.
Methods
We analyzed 2,085 18S rRNA gene sequences from the SILVA database for assay design. We generated and quantified plasmid standards using a qPCR-based approach. We evaluated assay coverage against 4,968 sequences and performed assay validation following the Minimum Information for Publication of Quantitative Real-Time PCR Experiments MIQE guidelines.
Results
We designed FungiQuant, a TaqManR qPCR assay targeting a 351 bp region in the fungal 18S rRNA gene. Our in silico analysis showed that FungiQuant is a perfect sequence match to 90.0% of the 2,617 fungal species analyzed. We showed that FungiQuants is 100% sensitive and its amplification efficiencies ranged from 76.3% to 114.5%, with r2-values of >0.99 against the 69 fungal species tested. Additionally, FungiQuant inter- and intra-run coefficients of variance ranged from <10% and <20%, respectively. We further showed that FungiQuant has a limit of quantification 25 copies and a limit of detection at 5 copies. Lastly, by comparing results from human-only background DNA with low-level fungal DNA, we showed that amplification in two or three of a FungiQuant performed in triplicate is statistically significant for true positive fungal detection.
Conclusions
FungiQuant has comprehensive coverage against diverse fungi and is a robust quantification and detection tool for delineating between true fungal detection and non-target human DNA.
Cindy M Liu, Sergey Kachur, Michael G Dwan, Alison G Abraham, Maliha Aziz, Po-Ren Hsueh, Yu-Tsung Huang, Joseph D Busch, Louis J Lamit, Catherine A Gehring, Paul Keim and Lance B Price
BMC Microbiology 2012, 12:255
doi: 10.1186/1471-2180-12-255
via BMC Microbiology | Abstract | FungiQuant: A broad-coverage fungal quantitative real-time PCR assay.
