title: Metagenomic Analysis of Microbiota in the Prostatitis Patients: Molecular Approaches for Assessing the Diversity of Microbial Communities
design: The role of human urogenital microbiome, contributions to health maintenance and when in imbalance, to the development of diseases, are poorly understood. To gain insight into this, metagenomic analyses were performed on the uncultivated bacterial communities from urethra and expressed prostatic secretion (EPS) of 9 and 14 non-clinically deﬁned prostatitis individuals in human using 454 high-throughput pyrosequencing of 16S rRNA gene tags. A total of 107,739 16S rRNA gene sequences were obtained from urethral control, urethral disease, EPS control, and EPS disease, with average read lengths of 417 bp and all of them were assigned to corresponding taxonomic ranks by using RDP classiﬁer and R software. It was found that Firmicutes (46.19%) is representing the highest diversity in urethral control sample, whereas Proteobacteria is the most prevalent and diverse phylum in urethral disease (60.39%) and increased 57.24% to 75.43% in the patient of EPS. The most abundant potentially pathogenic bacteria in the urethra and EPS with prostatitis were affiliated with the genera of Halomonas. It is concluded that prostatitis is associated with substantial alteration in the composition and representation of the urogenital bacterial biota.