Arterial Plaques Metagenome

Microbial infection has been proposed as an emergent cause of atherosclerosis. Infections in the vessel wall might promote inflammatory responses and generation of a procoagulant and proatherogenic environment. A range of microbial agents have been reported to play a role in atherosclerosis. However, there is a lack of high resolution investigation of microbial infectious agents that may contribute to atherosclerosis. Recent progress in deep sequencing technology has provided a potential approach for high throughput and comparative analysis of microbial communities. This study employed deep sequencing and metagenomic analysis to provide a high resolution investigation of microbial species distributed in plaques obtained from atherosclerosis patients.