Comparison of microbial DNA extraction methods for clinical applications

Technological advancements represented by the high-throughput Next-Generation Sequencing technology have led to a rapid growth in the collective knowledge of the human microbiota. Especially, intestinal microbiota has been suggested to be involved in a variety of diseases and host's phenotypes. However, lots of issues for clinical microbiome analysis are remained to be resolved. Although many experimental methodologies for microbiome are available, it is hard to use most methodologies for clinical applications because of time-consuming and troublesome procedures. Additionally, the difference of microbiome analysis results between research centers is one of the problems, resulting in difficult comparison between them. In this study, we assessed some microbiome analysis method including commercially-available microbial DNA extraction kit from human feces. Especially, we focused on precisely, working time, difficulty in addition to accuracy of microbial composition because these parameters are more important than accuracy for clinical applications.