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Alain Grillet for Sanofi Pasteur, via Flickr
The team, who are supported by the NIHR Oxford Biomedical Research Centre (BRC), used long-read genome sequencing on sputum and nasal lavage samples from people with asthma to study the airway microbiome.
Until now, the specific species in the airway microbiome have not been identified; neither have the relationships between these species and mucosal immune responses in neutrophilic asthma, a severe type of asthma caused by an accumulation of white blood cells in the lungs.
The study was led by Professor Timothy Hinks, of the University of Oxford’s Nuffield Department of Medicine and an Oxford BRC Senior Research Fellow. He explained: “We have used a fairly new genome sequencing technique, produced by Oxford Nanopore Technologies, which allowed us to identify the bacteria at individual species level, where older technologies were less precise.
“It has allowed us to achieve the best description to date of the microbiome in the lung in the world’s most common respiratory disease: asthma.”