Abstract
The human microbiome is important for health and plays a role in essential metabolic functions and protection from certain pathogens. Conversely, dysbiosis of the microbiome is seen in the context of various diseases. Recent studies have highlighted that a complex microbial community containing hundreds of bacteria colonizes the healthy urinary tract, but little is known about the human urinary viruses in health and disease. To evaluate the human urinary virome in the context of kidney transplantation (tx), variations in the composition of the urinary virome were evaluated in urine samples from normal healthy volunteers as well as patients with kidney disease after they had undergone kidney tx. Liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry/mass spectrometry analysis was undertaken on a selected cohort of 142 kidney tx patients and normal healthy controls, from a larger biobank of 770 kidney biopsy matched urine samples. In addition to analysis of normal healthy control urine, the cohort of kidney tx patients had biopsy confirmed phenotype classification, coincident with the urine sample analyzed, of stable grafts (STA), acute rejection, BK virus nephritis, and chronic allograft nephropathy. We identified 37 unique viruses, 29 of which are being identified for the first time in human urine samples. The composition of the human urinary virome differs in health and kidney injury, and the distribution of viral proteins in the urinary tract may be further impacted by IS exposure, diet and environmental, dietary, or cutaneous exposure to various insecticides and pesticides.
Highlights
The human microbiome has been studied extensively in various biofluids, such as blood [1], urine [2,3,4], saliva [5, 6], cerebrospinal fluid [7], and bronchoalveolar lavage [8, 9], for its influence on human health and disease [10]
Our group has previously published a detailed analysis of biologically relevant human proteins in these urine samples collected from kidney transplant recipients with different graft injury phenotypes, as confirmed by matched kidney transplant histopathology on the biopsy, collected at the same time as the urine sample; this data has been deposited in the proteomic MassIVE repository and in the ProteomeXchange repository [33]
We only focused on the identification and analysis of viral proteins in the same cohort of kidney transplant patients, with the inclusion of age- and gender-matched healthy control human urine samples to evaluate viral proteins in both health and kidney injury
Summary
The human microbiome has been studied extensively in various biofluids, such as blood [1], urine [2,3,4], saliva [5, 6], cerebrospinal fluid [7], and bronchoalveolar lavage [8, 9], for its influence on human health and disease [10]. Dysbiosis of the microbiome is associated with multiple diseases such as inflammatory bowel disease, colon cancer, obesity and pulmonary disease [21,22,23,24,25], but little is known about alterations of the virome in human body fluids, such as saliva, bronchoalverolar lavage and urine.
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