PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Loes M Olde Loohuis
AU  - Serghei Mangul
AU  - Anil PS Ori
AU  - Guillaume Jospin
AU  - David Koslicki
AU  - Harry Taegyun Yang
AU  - Timothy Wu
AU  - Marco P Boks
AU  - Catherine Lomen-Hoerth
AU  - Martina Wiedau-Pazos
AU  - Rita M Cantor
AU  - Willem M de Vos
AU  - René S Kahn
AU  - Eleazar Eskin
AU  - Roel A Ophoff
TI  - Transcriptome analysis in whole blood reveals increased microbial diversity in schizophrenia
AID  - 10.1101/057570
DP  - 2018 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 057570
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/04/29/057570.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/04/29/057570.full
AB  - The role of the human microbiome in health and disease is increasingly appreciated. We studied the composition of microbial communities present in blood across 192 individuals, including healthy controls and patients with three disorders affecting the brain: schizophrenia, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and bipolar disorder. By using high quality unmapped RNA sequencing reads as candidate microbial reads, we performed profiling of microbial transcripts detected in whole blood. We were able to detect a wide range of bacterial and archaeal phyla in blood. Interestingly, we observed an increased microbial diversity in schizophrenia patients compared to the three other groups. We replicated this finding in an independent schizophrenia case-control cohort. This increased diversity is inversely correlated with estimated cell abundance of a subpopulation of CD8+ memory T cells in healthy controls, supporting a link between microbial products found in blood, immunity and schizophrenia.