Analysis of intestinal microbial composition and function of mother-infant pairs by single cell amplification technique

Microorganism plays an important role in human health, such as promoting digestion and absorption, regulating the host immune system, maintaining dental health, and resistance to pathogens invasion.In the natural environment, only 1% of the microbes can be cultured. Thus, many low and non-cultivatable taxa cannot be accurately identified by traditional methods. In this experiment, we applied the single cell multiple replacement amplification (MDA) technique combining with PCR-based whole genome amplification methods. This technique can reduce amplification bias by 3 ~ 4 orders of magnitude, increase the minimal DNA of a single bacterial cell by about 5 billion times, and produce an average length of >12 kb amplification, which allows the gene fragment to be sequenced accurately.In this experiment, we applied the single-cell amplification technique to analyze 3 pairs of maternal and infant feces (a total of 48 bacterial suspensions) in order to explore the composition of intestinal microorganisms and analyze the related functional genes.