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Macroscale spatial variation in chronic wound microbiota: A cross‐sectional study
Author(s) -
Price Lance B.,
Liu Cindy M.,
Frankel Yelena M.,
Melendez Johan H.,
Aziz Maliha,
Buchhagen Jordan,
ContenteCuomo Tania,
Engelthaler David M.,
Keim Paul S.,
Ravel Jacques,
Lazarus Gerald S.,
Zenilman Jonathan M.
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
wound repair and regeneration
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.847
H-Index - 109
eISSN - 1524-475X
pISSN - 1067-1927
DOI - 10.1111/j.1524-475x.2010.00628.x
Subject(s) - chronic wound , curette , 16s ribosomal rna , biology , hierarchical clustering , spatial variability , pyrosequencing , wound healing , medicine , cluster analysis , bacteria , pathology , genetics , gene , statistics , mathematics
Controlling for sample site is considered to be an important aspect of chronic wound microbiological investigations; yet, macroscale spatial variation in wound microbiota has not been well characterized. A total of 31 curette samples were collected at the leading edge, opposing leading edge, and/or center of 13 chronic wounds. Bacterial community composition was characterized using a combination of 16S rRNA gene‐based pyrosequencing; heat map display; hierarchical clustering; nonmetric multidimensional scaling; and permutation multivariate analysis of variance. A total of 58 bacterial families and 91 bacterial genera were characterized among the 13 wounds. While substantial macroscale spatial variation was observed among the wounds, bacterial communities at different sites within individual wounds were significantly more similar than those in different wounds ( p =0.001). Our results support the prevalent opinion that controlling for sample site may improve the quality of wound microbiota studies; however, the significant similarity in bacterial communities from different sites within individual wounds indicates that studies failing to control for sampling site should not be disregarded based solely on this criterion. A composite sample from multiple sites across the surface of individual wounds may provide the most robust characterization of wound microbiota.