Stearns JC, Davidson CJ, McKeon S, Whelan FJ, Fontes ME, Schryvers AB, Bowdish DM, Kellner JD, Surette MG. Culture and molecular-based profiles show shifts in bacterial communities of the upper respiratory tract that occur with age. ISME J. 2015 May;9(5):1268. doi: 10.1038/ismej.2015.49.

Abstract: The upper respiratory tract (URT) is a crucial site for host defense, as it is home to bacterial communities that both modulate host immune defense and serve as a reservoir of potential pathogens. Young children are at high risk of respiratory illness, yet the composition of their URT microbiota is not well understood. Microbial profiling of the respiratory tract has traditionally focused on culturing common respiratory pathogens, whereas recent culture-independent microbiome profiling can only report the relative abundance of bacterial populations. In the current study, we used both molecular profiling of the bacterial 16S rRNA gene and laboratory culture to examine the bacterial diversity from the oropharynx and nasopharynx of 51 healthy children with a median age of 1.1 years (range 1–4.5 years) along with 19 accompanying parents. The resulting profiles suggest that in young children the nasopharyngeal microbiota, much like the gastrointestinal tract microbiome, changes from an immature state, where it is colonized by a few dominant taxa, to a more diverse state as it matures to resemble the adult microbiota. Importantly, this difference in bacterial diversity between adults and children accompanies a change in bacterial load of three orders of magnitude. This indicates that the bacterial communities in the nasopharynx of young children have a fundamentally different structure from those in adults and suggests that maturation of this community occurs sometime during the first few years of life, a period that includes ages at which children are at the highest risk for respiratory disease.

Yap N, Whelan FJ, Bowdish DM and Golding B (2015). The Evolution of the Scavenger Receptor Cysteine-Rich Domain of the Class A Scavenger Receptors. Front. Immunol. 6:342. doi: 10.3389/fimmu.2015.00342

Abstract

The class A Scavenger Receptor (cA-SR) family is a group of five evolutionarily related innate immune receptors. The cA-SRs are known for their promiscuous ligand binding; as they have been shown to bind bacteria such as Streptococcus pneumoniae, and Escherichia coli, as well as different modified forms of low-density lipoprotein. Three of the five family members possess a Scavenger Receptor Cysteine Rich (SRCR) domain while the remaining two receptors lack the domain. Previous work has suggested that the Macrophage Associated Receptor with COllagenous structure (MARCO) shares a recent common ancestor with the non-SRCR-containing receptors; however the origin of the SRCR domain within the cA-SRs remains unknown. We hypothesize that the SRCR domains of the cA-SRs have a common origin that predates teleost fish. Using the newly available sequence data from sea lamprey and ghost shark genome projects, we have shown that MARCO shares a common ancestor with the SRCR-containing proteins. In addition, we explored the evolutionary relationships within the SRCR domain by reconstructing the ancestral SRCR domains of the cA-SRs. We identified a motif that is highly conserved between the cA-SR SRCR domains and the ancestral SRCR domain that consist of WGTVCDD. We also show that the GRAEVYY motif, a functionally important motif within MARCO, is poorly conserved in the other cA-SRs and in the reconstructed ancestral domain. Further, we identified three sites within MARCO’s SRCR domain which are under positive selection. Two of these sites lie adjacent to the conserved WGTVCDD motif, and may indicate a potential biological function for these sites. Together these findings indicate a common origin of the SRCR domain within the cA-SRs; however different selective pressures between the proteins may have caused MARCOs SRCR domain to evolve to contain different functional motifs when compared to the other SRCR-containing cA-SRs.