Molecular Microbiology, Microbial, S.L.
September 2016 - June 2017
Internship and Bachelor's thesis student
In the context of my bachelor’s thesis (BSc in Biotechnology) and under the supervision of Prof. Jesús García-Gil, I studied the diversity of the ileal mucosa-related microbiota of colorectal cancer patients submitted to an ileostomy and its changes after a butyrate treatment. Using DNA extracted from human biopsies of ileal mucosa, we performed qPCR and high-throughput sequencing followed by a SPSS-based statistical analysis to search for the differences between the butyrate-treated, placebo-treated and untreated groups, and we found that some healthy-related butyrate-producing bacteria increased in proportion after the butyrate-treated, but not in the other groups. At the same time, different disease-related bacteria were found to decrease in the butyrate group after the treatment compared to the other groups. Although the changes weren’t higly robust in terms of significancy, the short-period of the treatment (4 weeks) and its conditions (ileostomy allows oxigen to enter the ileum, which is supposed to be an anoxic environment) made us think that a long-term butyrate treatment could improve microbiological conditions in the studied patients.
My contributions to this research were:
- Performing DNA extractions of the intestinal biopsies.
- Performing qPCR analyses to detect and quantify some of the crucial bacterial families and genera.
- Performing SPSS-based statistical analysis for the high-throughput sequencing-derived data.
- Performing qPCR analyses to detect and quantify some of the species found to be increased in the sequencing data.
Bachelor’s thesis:
- Butyrate-induced changes in the diversity of intestinal mucosa-associated microbiota in colorectal cancer patients submitted to a lateral ileostomy.