Developing global whole cell standards for the microbiome field

The microbiome field has developed rapidly over the last decade, however there is no effective standardisation of protocols in place, with no accredited or certified reference materials available to the wider community. As part of the NIBSC Microbiome program, we developed whole cell standards for microbiome research which can act as global working standards and will be put forward for consideration as the first whole cell World Health Organization International Reference Reagents for microbiome analysis. The developed reagents consist of common bacteria found in human gut and have been tested using different commercial DNA extraction kits in order to detect biases introduced through different DNA extraction processes. Multiple replicates of DNA extracted the whole cell standard using different DNA extraction kits were assessed using Next Generation Sequencing and evaluated using the number of input cells in the standards, as measured by microscopy and flow cytometry. These NIBSC whole cell standards are aimed to standardise the DNA extraction steps in microbiome analytical pipelines and serve as a tool to more accurately capture the representation of each microbe in the gut microbiome. This could be achieved by setting a specific threshold of accepted error levels by the microbiome community and we aim to set this through a large collaborative study in 2020-21. This work is part of a larger NIBSC microbiome program that is developing site specific DNA, whole cell and matrix spike-in reagents for use in microbiome research.