PhenoGMM: Gaussian Mixture Modeling of Cytometry Data Quantifies Changes in Microbial Community Structure

Unlocking the mechanism of action: a cost-effective flow cytometry approach for accelerating antimicrobial drug development

Antimicrobial resistance is one of the greatest challenges to global health. While the development of new antimicrobials can combat resistance, low profitability reduces the number of new compounds brought to market. Elucidating the mechanism of action is crucial for developing new antimicrobials. This can become expensive as there are no universally applicable pipelines. Phenotypic heterogeneity of microbial populations resulting from antimicrobial treatment can be captured through flow cytometric fingerprinting. Since antimicrobials are classified into limited groups, the mechanism of action of known compounds can be used for predictive modeling. We demonstrate a cost-effective flow cytometry approach for determining the mechanism of action of new compounds. Cultures of Actinomyces viscosus and Fusobacterium nucleatum were treated with different antimicrobials and measured by flow cytometry. A Gaussian mixture mask was applied over the data to construct phenotypic fingerprints. Fingerprints were used to assess statistical differences between mechanism of action groups and to train random forest classifiers. Classifiers were then used to predict the mechanism of action of cephalothin. Statistical differences were found among the different mechanisms of action groups. Pairwise comparison showed statistical differences for 35 out of 45 pairs for A. viscosus and for 32 out of 45 pairs for F. nucleatum after 3.5 h of treatment. The best-performing random forest classifier yielded a Matthews correlation coefficient of 0.92 and the mechanism of action of cephalothin could be successfully predicted. These findings suggest that flow cytometry can be a cheap and fast alternative for determining the mechanism of action of new antimicrobials.IMPORTANCEIn the context of the emerging threat of antimicrobial resistance, the development of novel antimicrobials is a commonly employed strategy to combat resistance. Elucidating the mechanism of action of novel compounds is crucial in this development but can become expensive, as no universally applicable pipelines currently exist. We present a novel flow cytometry-based approach capable of determining the mechanism of action swiftly and cost-effectively. The workflow aims to accelerate drug discovery and could help facilitate a more targeted approach for antimicrobial treatment of patients.

Domestic hot-water boilers harbour active thermophilic bacterial communities distinctly different from those in the cold-water supply

Running cold and hot water in buildings is a widely established commodity. However, interests regarding hygiene and microbiological aspects had so far been focussed on cold water. Little attention has been given to the microbiology of domestic hot-water installations (DHWIs), except for aspects of pathogenic Legionella. World-wide, regulations consider hot (or warm) water as 'heated drinking water' that must comply (cold) drinking water (DW) standards. However, the few reports that exist indicate presence and growth of microbial flora in DHWIs, even when supplied with water with disinfectant residual. Using flow cytometric (FCM) total cell counting (TCC), FCM-fingerprinting, and 16S rRNA-gene-based metagenomic analysis, the characteristics and composition of bacterial communities in cold drinking water (DW) and hot water from associated boilers (operating at 50 - 60 °C) was studied in 14 selected inhouse DW installations located in Switzerland and Austria. A sampling strategy was applied that ensured access to the bulk water phase of both, supplied cold DW and produced hot boiler water. Generally, 1.3- to 8-fold enhanced TCCs were recorded in hot water compared to those in the supplied cold DW. FCM-fingerprints of cold and corresponding hot water from individual buildings indicated different composition of cold- and hot-water microbial floras. Also, hot waters from each of the boilers sampled had its own individual FCM-fingerprint. 16S rRNA-gene-based metagenomic analysis confirmed the marked differences in composition of microbiomes. E.g., in three neighbouring houses supplied from the same public network pipe each hot-water boiler contained its own thermophilic bacterial flora. Generally, bacterial diversity in cold DW was broad, that in hot water was restricted, with mostly thermophilic strains from the families Hydrogenophilaceae, Nitrosomonadaceae and Thermaceae dominating. Batch growth assays, consisting of cold DW heated up to 50 - 60 °C and inoculated with hot water, resulted in immediate cell growth with doubling times between 5 and 10 h. When cold DW was used as an inoculum no significant growth was observed. Even boilers supplied with UVC-treated cold DW contained an actively growing microbial flora, suggesting such hot-water systems as autonomously operating, thermophilic bioreactors. The generation of assimilable organic carbon from dissolved organic carbon due to heating appears to be the driver for growth of thermophilic microbial communities. Our report suggests that a man-made microbial ecosystem, very close to us all and of potential hygienic importance, may have been overlooked so far. Despite consumers having been exposed to microbial hot-water flora for a long time, with no major pathogens so far been associated specifically with hot-water usage (except for Legionella), the role of harmless thermophiles and their interaction with potential human pathogens able to grow at elevated temperatures in DHWIs remains to be investigated.

Convergence of flow cytometry and bacteriology. Current and future applications: a focus on food and clinical microbiology

Since its development in the 1960s, flow cytometry (FCM) was quickly revealed a powerful tool to analyse cell populations in medical studies, yet, for many years, was almost exclusively used to analyse eukaryotic cells. Instrument and methodological limitations to distinguish genuine bacterial signals from the background, among other limitations, have hampered FCM applications in bacteriology. In recent years, thanks to the continuous development of FCM instruments and methods with a higher discriminatory capacity to detect low-size particles, FCM has emerged as an appealing technique to advance the study of microbes, with important applications in research, clinical and industrial settings. The capacity to rapidly enumerate and classify individual bacterial cells based on viability facilitates the monitoring of bacterial presence in foodstuffs or clinical samples, reducing the time needed to detect contamination or infectious processes. Besides, FCM has stood out as a valuable tool to advance the study of complex microbial communities, or microbiomes, that are very relevant in the context of human health, as well as to understand the interaction of bacterial and host cells. This review highlights current developments in, and future applications of, FCM in bacteriology, with a focus on those related to food and clinical microbiology.

Predicting the performance of chain elongating microbiomes through flow cytometric fingerprinting

As part of the circular bio-economy paradigm shift, waste management and valorisation practices have moved away from sanitation and towards the production of added-value compounds. Recently, the development of mixed culture bioprocess for the conversion of waste(water) to platform chemicals, such as medium chain carboxylic acids, has attracted significant interest. Often, the microbiology of these novel bioprocesses is less diverse and more prone to disturbances, which can lead to process failure. This issue can be tackled by implementing an advanced monitoring strategy based on the microbiology of the process. In this study, flow cytometry was used to monitor the microbiology of lactic acid chain elongation for the production of caproic acid, and assess its performance both qualitatively and quantitatively. Two continuous stirred tank reactors for chain elongation were monitored flow cytometrically for over 336 days. Through community typing, four specific community types could be identified and correlated to both a specific functionality and genotypic diversity. Additionally, the machine-learning algorithms trained in this study demonstrated the ability to predict production rates of, amongst others, caproic acid with high accuracy in the present (R² > 0.87) and intermediate accuracy in the near future (R² > 0.63). The identification of specific community types and the development of predictive algorithms form the basis of advanced bioprocess monitoring based on flow cytometry, and have the potential to improve bioprocess control and optimization, leading to better product quality and yields.

Opportunities in optical and electrical single-cell technologies to study microbial ecosystems

New techniques are revolutionizing single-cell research, allowing us to study microbes at unprecedented scales and in unparalleled depth. This review highlights the state-of-the-art technologies in single-cell analysis in microbial ecology applications, with particular attention to both optical tools, i.e., specialized use of flow cytometry and Raman spectroscopy and emerging electrical techniques. The objectives of this review include showcasing the diversity of single-cell optical approaches for studying microbiological phenomena, highlighting successful applications in understanding microbial systems, discussing emerging techniques, and encouraging the combination of established and novel approaches to address research questions. The review aims to answer key questions such as how single-cell approaches have advanced our understanding of individual and interacting cells, how they have been used to study uncultured microbes, which new analysis tools will become widespread, and how they contribute to our knowledge of ecological interactions.

Single-Cell Techniques in Environmental Microbiology

Environmental microbiology has been an essential part of environmental research because it provides effective solutions to most pollutants. Hence, there is an interest in investigating microorganism behavior, such as observation, identification, isolation of pollutant degraders, and interactions between microbial species. To comprehensively understand cell heterogeneity, diverse approaches at the single-cell level are demanded. Thus far, the traditional bulk biological tools such as petri dishes are technically challenging for single cells, which could mask the heterogeneity. Single-cell technologies can reveal complex and rare cell populations by detecting heterogeneity among individual cells, which offers advantages of higher resolution, higher throughput, more accurate analysis, etc. Here, we overviewed several single-cell techniques on observation, isolation, and identification from aspects of methods and applications. Microscopic observation, sequencing identification, flow cytometric identification and isolation, Raman spectroscopy-based identification and isolation, and their applications are mainly discussed. Further development on multi-technique integrations at the single-cell level may highly advance the research progress of environmental microbiology, thereby giving more indication in the environmental microbial ecology.

Ecological forces dictate microbial community assembly processes in bioreactor systems

Microbial communities are indispensable for future biotechnology to produce valuable platform chemicals and reduce the exploitation of fossil resources. Yet, the stability of microbial communities in classical continuous reactor setups is best brief or non-existent. This is due to ecological forces such as stochastic and deterministic properties of communities that contribute to rapid changes in structure and function to varying degrees. The review highlights the differences between these two properties, provides tools for their estimation, and gives an outlook on overcoming instabilities of microbial communities in biotechnological reactor systems.

Tracking defined microbial communities by multicolor flow cytometry reveals tradeoffs between productivity and diversity

Cross feeding between microbes is ubiquitous, but its impact on the diversity and productivity of microbial communities is incompletely understood. A reductionist approach using simple microbial communities has the potential to detect cross feeding interactions and their impact on ecosystem properties. However, quantifying abundance of more than two microbes in a community in a high throughput fashion requires rapid, inexpensive assays. Here, we show that multicolor flow cytometry combined with a machine learning-based classifier can rapidly quantify species abundances in simple, synthetic microbial communities. Our approach measures community structure over time and detects the exchange of metabolites in a four-member community of fluorescent Bacteroides species. Notably, we quantified species abundances in co-cultures and detected evidence of cooperation in polysaccharide processing and competition for monosaccharide utilization. We also observed that co-culturing on simple sugars, but not complex sugars, reduced microbial productivity, although less productive communities maintained higher community diversity. In summary, our multicolor flow cytometric approach presents an economical, tractable model system for microbial ecology using well-studied human bacteria. It can be extended to include additional species, evaluate more complex environments, and assay response of communities to a variety of disturbances.

Bacterial, Phytoplankton, and Viral Distributions and Their Biogeochemical Contexts in Meromictic Lake Cadagno Offer Insights into the Proterozoic Ocean Microbial Loop

Lake Cadagno, a permanently stratified high-alpine lake with a persistent microbial bloom in its chemocline, has long been considered a model for the low-oxygen, high-sulfide Proterozoic ocean. Although the lake has been studied for over 25 years, the absence of concerted study of the bacteria, phytoplankton, and viruses, together with primary and secondary production, has hindered a comprehensive understanding of its microbial food web. Here, the identities, abundances, and productivity of microbes were evaluated in the context of Lake Cadagno biogeochemistry. Photosynthetic pigments together with 16S rRNA gene phylogenies suggest the prominence of eukaryotic phytoplankton chloroplasts, primarily chlorophytes. Chloroplasts closely related to those of high-alpine-adapted Ankyra judayi persisted with oxygen in the mixolimnion, where photosynthetic efficiency was high, while chloroplasts of Closteriopsis-related chlorophytes peaked in the chemocline and monimolimnion. The anoxygenic phototrophic sulfur bacterium Chromatium dominated the chemocline along with Lentimicrobium, a genus of known fermenters. Secondary production peaked in the chemocline, which suggested that anoxygenic primary producers depended on heterotrophic nutrient remineralization. The virus-to-microbe ratio peaked with phytoplankton abundances in the mixolimnion and were at a minimum where Chromatium abundance was highest, trends that suggest that viruses may play a role in the modulation of primary production. Through the combined analysis of bacterial, eukaryotic, viral, and biogeochemical spatial dynamics, we provide a comprehensive synthesis of the Lake Cadagno microbial loop. This study offers a new ecological perspective on how biological and geochemical connections may have occurred in the chemocline of the Proterozoic ocean, where eukaryotic microbial life is thought to have evolved.

Recent advances in microbial community analysis from machine learning of multiparametric flow cytometry data

Dynamic analysis of microbial composition is crucial for understanding community functioning and detecting dysbiosis. Compositional information is mostly obtained through sequencing of taxonomic markers or whole meta-genomes, which may be productively complemented by real-time quantitative community multiparametric flow cytometry data (FCM). Patterns and clusters in FCM community data can be distinguished and compared by unsupervised machine learning. Alternatively, FCM data from preselected individual strain phenotypes can be used for supervised machine-training in order to differentiate similar cell types within communities. Both types of machine learning can quantitatively deconvolute community FCM data sets and rapidly analyse global changes in response to treatment. Procedures may further be optimized for recurrent microbiome samples to simultaneously quantify physiological and compositional states.

Predicting the Presence and Abundance of Bacterial Taxa in Environmental Communities through Flow Cytometric Fingerprinting

Microbiome management research and applications rely on temporally resolved measurements of community composition. Current technologies to assess community composition make use of either cultivation or sequencing of genomic material, which can become time-consuming and/or laborious in case high-throughput measurements are required. Here, using data from a shrimp hatchery as an economically relevant case study, we combined 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing and flow cytometry data to develop a computational workflow that allows the prediction of taxon abundances based on flow cytometry measurements. The first stage of our pipeline consists of a classifier to predict the presence or absence of the taxon of interest, with yielded an average accuracy of 88.13% ± 4.78% across the top 50 operational taxonomic units (OTUs) of our data set. In the second stage, this classifier was combined with a regression model to predict the relative abundances of the taxon of interest, which yielded an average R² of 0.35 ± 0.24 across the top 50 OTUs of our data set. Application of the models to flow cytometry time series data showed that the generated models can predict the temporal dynamics of a large fraction of the investigated taxa. Using cell sorting, we validated that the model correctly associates taxa to regions in the cytometric fingerprint, where they are detected using 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing. Finally, we applied the approach of our pipeline to two other data sets of microbial ecosystems. This pipeline represents an addition to the expanding toolbox for flow cytometry-based monitoring of bacterial communities and complements the current plating- and marker gene-based methods.

IMPORTANCE Monitoring of microbial community composition is crucial for both microbiome management research and applications. Existing technologies, such as plating and amplicon sequencing, can become laborious and expensive when high-throughput measurements are required. In recent years, flow cytometry-based measurements of community diversity have been shown to correlate well with those derived from 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing in several aquatic ecosystems, suggesting that there is a link between the taxonomic community composition and phenotypic properties as derived through flow cytometry. Here, we further integrated 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing and flow cytometry survey data in order to construct models that enable the prediction of both the presence and the abundances of individual bacterial taxa in mixed communities using flow cytometric fingerprinting. The developed pipeline holds great potential to be integrated into routine monitoring schemes and early warning systems for biotechnological applications.