title: Emerging Concepts and Technologies for the Discovery of Microorganisms Involved in Human Disease.
abstract: Established infectious agents continue to be a major cause of human morbidity and mortality worldwide. However, the causative agent remains unknown for a wide range of diseases; many of these are suspected to be attributable to yet undiscovered microorganisms. The advent of unbiased high-throughput sequencing and bioinformatics has enabled rapid identification and molecular characterization of known and novel infectious agents in human disease. An exciting era of microbe discovery, now under way, holds great promise for the improvement of global health via the development of antimicrobial therapies, vaccination strategies, targeted public health measures, and probiotic-based preventions and therapies. Here, we review the history of pathogen discovery, discuss improvements and clinical applications for the detection of microbially associated diseases, and explore the challenges and strategies for establishing causation in human disease.
authors.affiliation: Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, Massachusetts 02215; email: susan_bullman@dfci.harvard.edu , matthew_meyerson@dfci.harvard.edu.|Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142.
authors.forename: Susan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Bullman
authors.affiliation: Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, Massachusetts 02215; email: susan_bullman@dfci.harvard.edu , matthew_meyerson@dfci.harvard.edu.|Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142.|Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts 02115.
authors.forename: Matthew
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Meyerson
authors.affiliation: Research Division, Joslin Diabetes Center, Boston, Massachusetts 02215; email: aleksandar.kostic@joslin.harvard.edu.|Department of Microbiology and Immunobiology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts 02115.
authors.forename: Aleksandar D
authors.initials: AD
authors.lastname: Kostic
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001424:Bacterial Infections / Q000150:complications* / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000235:genetics; D003141:Communicable Diseases / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000235:genetics / Q000382:microbiology*; D019295:Computational Biology / Q000379:methods*; D059014:High-Throughput Nucleotide Sequencing / Q000379:methods*; D006801:Humans; D025202:Molecular Diagnostic Techniques
keywords: disease etiology; microbiology; microbiome; next-generation sequencing; pathogen discovery; symbionts; virology