Assessment of DNA extraction methods for human gut mycobiome analysis

The gut mycobiome plays an important role in the health and disease of the human gut, but its exact function is still under investigation. While there is a wealth of information available on the bacterial community of the human gut microbiome, research on the fungal community is still relatively limited. In particular, technical methodologies for mycobiome analysis, especially the DNA extraction method for human fecal samples, varied in different studies.1) In the current study, two commercial kits commonly used in DNA extraction, the QIAamp Fast DNA Stool Mini Kit and DNeasy PowerSoil Pro Kit, and one manual method, the International Human Microbiome Standards Protocol Q, were compared.2) Furthermore, the effectiveness of two different bead-beating machines, the Mini-Beadbeater-16 and FastPrep-24 5G, was compared in parallel.