Dramatic alteration of tonsil microbial community composition in RA patients. Tonsil microbiota in rheumatoid arthritis

Stage I: We performed 16S ribosomal RNA gene sequencing of tonsillar samples from 121 RA patients and 99 healthy controls and conducted comparing analysis to identify RA-associated microbiomic signatures. We generated 17,144 operational taxonomic units (OTUs) from 9,752,103 high quality sequences (44,328 ± 17,438 per sample).Stage II: To validate that the alterations in microbial taxa can further shift the function potential in the tonsil microbiome, we analyzed the tonsil samples of 32 RA patients and 30 healthy controls (including 13 patients and 11 controls were in the former cohort) using whole-metagenome sequencing. We generated a total of 554 Gbp high-quality microbial data (8.9 ± 6.1 Gbp per sample).