Overview
- Researchers at Mount Sinai report a Nature Microbiology study introducing LongTrack, a computational pipeline paired with long-read DNA sequencing to follow donor microbes after fecal microbiota transplant.
- Analyses of donor and recipient stool from patients treated for C. difficile infection and IBD showed many donor strains engrafted and persisted in recipients for as long as five years.
- The method distinguishes closely related strains by unique genetic fingerprints while capturing large insertions, deletions, plasmids, and methylation patterns that short reads miss.
- Genetic changes observed in engrafted strains indicate adaptation to individual hosts, highlighting how patient-specific gut environments shape microbial evolution.
- The approach outperformed conventional short-read tracking and the team plans larger cohorts and additional disease settings to identify candidate strains for defined microbial therapeutics.