Date of Award

Fall 2022

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Bioinformatics & Computational Biology

Abstract

Celiac disease is an autoimmune disorder of the small intestine in which gluten, an energy-storage protein in wheat and other cereals, elicits an immune response leading to villous atrophy. Despite a strong genetic component, the disease arises sporadically over the lifetime leading us to hypothesize the microbiome might be a trigger. Here, we re-examined 16S data from 3 prior studies examining celiac disease and the microbiome with newer computational tools: the dada2 and PICRUSt 2 pipelines. Our results both confirmed findings of previous studies and generated new data regarding the celiac microbiome of India and Mexico. The datasets were also pooled to determine whether any taxonomic or metabolic features remained consistent across the world using a variety of data transformations to control for batch effects. Our results showed the celiac microbiome displays dysbiosis without a discernable pattern, likely indicating that perturbations in the CD microbiome are a result of the disease rather than a cause of the disease. Data from PICRUSt 2 further confirms this, showing connections to the CD metabolome which are supported by previous research examining dysbiotic microbiomes.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

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