Composition and variation of respiratory microbiota in healthy military personnel Metagenome. Human respiratory microbiome

Certain occupational and geographical exposures have been associated with an increased risk of lung disease. As a baseline for future studies, we sought to characterize the upper respiratory microbiome of healthy military personnel in a garrison environment. Nasal, oropharyngeal and nasopharyngeal swabs were collected from 50 healthy active duty volunteers eight times over the course of one year and subjected to pyrosequencing of 16S rDNA V3 to V1 region. The study produced a large set of pyrosequencing data of bacterial 16S rDNA V3-V1 region for respiratory microbiome of healthy active duty service members. Pre-processing of sequencing reads shows good data quality. The derived microbiome profiles are consistent both internally and with previous reports, suggesting utility for further analyses and association studies using sequence and demographic data.