Gut and Oral Microbiome Dysbiosis in Rheumatoid Arthritis

Bacterial infection has long been implicated with rheumatoid arthritis (RA), but a systematic analysis of the probiotic and pathogenic microbiome in RA has been lacking. It is not clear whether and how the gut or oral microbial community is compositionally and functionally altered in RA, and whether and how the microbiota at different body sites overlap. Here we perform whole-genome shotgun sequencing for fecal, dental and salivary samples from a large cohort of RA patients, analyze metagenomic linkage groups to construct an RA classifier, and assemble a pathogen’s draft genome using SOAPMeta.