Publications by authors named "Bostjan Murovec"

This study aimed to compare the microbiome profiles of patients with colorectal cancer (CRC,  = 380) and colorectal adenomas (CRA,  = 110) against generally healthy participants ( = 2,461) from various studies. The overarching objective was to conduct a real-life experiment and develop a robust machine learning model applicable to the general population. A total of 2,951 stool samples underwent a comprehensive analysis using the in-house MetaBakery pipeline.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Preterm birth (before 37 weeks gestation) accounts for ~10% of births worldwide and remains one of the leading causes of death in children under 5 years of age. Preterm born adults have been consistently shown to be at an increased risk for chronic disorders including cardiovascular, endocrine/metabolic, respiratory, renal, neurologic, and psychiatric disorders that result in increased death risk. Oxidative stress was shown to be an important risk factor for hypertension, metabolic syndrome and lung disease (reduced pulmonary function, long-term obstructive pulmonary disease, respiratory infections, and sleep disturbances).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Physical inactivity is a worldwide health problem, an important risk for global mortality and is associated with chronic noncommunicable diseases. The aim of this study was to explore the differences in systemic urine H-NMR metabolomes between physically active and inactive healthy young males enrolled in the X-Adapt project in response to controlled exercise (before and after the 3-day exercise testing and 10-day training protocol) in normoxic (21% O), normobaric (~1000 hPa) and normal-temperature (23 °C) conditions at 1 h of 50% maximal pedaling power output (W) per day. Interrogation of the exercise database established from past X-Adapt results showed that significant multivariate differences existed in physiological traits between trained and untrained groups before and after training sessions and were mirrored in significant differences in urine pH, salinity, total dissolved solids and conductivity.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

General Unified Microbiome Profiling Pipeline (GUMPP) was developed for large scale, streamlined and reproducible analysis of bacterial 16S rRNA data and prediction of microbial metagenomes, enzymatic reactions and metabolic pathways from amplicon data. GUMPP workflow introduces reproducible data analyses at each of the three levels of resolution (genus; operational taxonomic units (OTUs); amplicon sequence variants (ASVs)). The ability to support reproducible analyses enables production of datasets that ultimately identify the biochemical pathways characteristic of disease pathology.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Microbial species play important roles in different environments and the production of high-quality genomes from metagenome data sets represents a major obstacle to understanding their ecological and evolutionary dynamics. Metagenome-Assembled Genomes Orchestra (MAGO) is a computational framework that integrates and simplifies metagenome assembly, binning, bin improvement, bin quality (completeness and contamination), bin annotation, and evolutionary placement of bins via detailed maximum-likelihood phylogeny based on multiple marker genes using different amino acid substitution models, next to average nucleotide identity analysis of genomes for delineation of species boundaries and operational taxonomic units. MAGO offers streamlined execution of the entire metagenomics pipeline, error checking, computational resource distribution and compatibility of data formats, governed by user-tailored pipeline processing.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

In this study, nuclear magnetic resonance (H NMR) spectroscopic profiling was used to provide a more comprehensive view of microbial metabolites associated with poor reactor performance in a full-scale 4 MW mesophilic agricultural biogas plant under fully operational and also under inhibited conditions. Multivariate analyses were used to assess the significance of differences between reactors whereas artificial neural networks (ANN) were used to identify the key metabolites responsible for inhibition and their network of interaction. Based on the results of nm-MDS ordination the subsamples of each reactor were similar, but not identical, despite homogenization of the full-scale reactors before sampling.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

We explored the metagenomic, metabolomic and trace metal makeup of intestinal microbiota and environment in healthy male participants during the run-in (5 day) and the following three 21-day interventions: normoxic bedrest (NBR), hypoxic bedrest (HBR) and hypoxic ambulation (HAmb) which were carried out within a controlled laboratory environment (circadian rhythm, fluid and dietary intakes, microbial bioburden, oxygen level, exercise). The fraction of inspired O (FO) and partial pressure of inspired O (PO) were 0.209 and 133.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

We explored the assembly of intestinal microbiota in healthy male participants during the randomized crossover design of run-in (5 day) and experimental phases (21-day normoxic bed rest (NBR), hypoxic bed rest (HBR) and hypoxic ambulation (HAmb) in a strictly controlled laboratory environment, with balanced fluid and dietary intakes, controlled circadian rhythm, microbial ambiental burden and 24/7 medical surveillance. The fraction of inspired O2 (FiO2) and partial pressure of inspired O2 (PiO2) were 0.209 and 133.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

We explored the assembly of intestinal microbiota in healthy male participants during the run-in (5 day) and experimental phases [21-day normoxic bed rest (NBR), hypoxic bedrest (HBR)], and hypoxic ambulation (HAmb) in a strictly controlled laboratory environment, balanced fluid, and dietary intakes, controlled circadian rhythm, microbial ambiental burden, and 24/7 medical surveillance. The fraction of inspired O (FO) and partial pressure of inspired O (PO) were 0.209 and 133.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The aim of this study was to develop and validate a community supported online infrastructure and bioresource for methane yield data and accompanying metadata collected from published literature. In total, 1164 entries described by 15,749 data points were assembled. Analysis of data collection showed little congruence in reporting of methodological approaches.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: The Himalaya with its altitude and geographical position forms a barrier to atmospheric transport, which produces much aqueous-particle monsoon precipitation and makes it the largest continuous ice-covered area outside polar regions. There is a paucity of data on high-altitude microbial communities, their native environments and responses to environmental-spatial variables relative to seasonal and deglaciation events.

Methodology/principal Findings: Soils were sampled along altitude transects from 5000 m to 6000 m to determine environmental, spatial and seasonal factors structuring bacterial communities characterized by 16 S rRNA gene deep sequencing.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The exponential growth of available DNA sequences and the increased interoperability of biological information is triggering intergovernmental efforts aimed at increasing the access, dissemination, and analysis of sequence data. Achieving the efficient storage and processing of DNA material is an important goal that parallels well with the foreseen coding standardization on the horizon. This paper proposes novel coding approaches, for both the dissemination and processing of sequences, where the speed of the DNA processing is shown to be boosted by exploring more than the normally utilized eight bits for encoding a single nucleotide.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Summary: BEsTRF (Best Estimated T-RF) provides a standalone environment for analyzing primers-enzymes-gene section combinations used in terminal-restriction fragment length polymorphism (T-RFLP) for its optimal resolution. User-defined sequence databases of several hundred thousand DNA sequences can be explored and the resolution of user-specified sets of primers and restriction endonucleases can be analyzed on either forward or reverse terminal fragments. Sequence quality, primer mismatches, insertions and deletions can be controlled and each primer pair-specific sequence collections can be exported for downstream analyses.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF