Bacterial sequences detected in 99 out of 99 serum samples from Ebola patients

Abstract

Evolution and clinical manifestations of Ebola virus (EBOV) infection overlap with the pathologic processes that occur in sepsis1. Some viruses certainly compromise the immune system, leading to a breach in the integrity of the mucosal epithelial barrier, thus allowing bacterial translocation2, 3. Guided by these facts, we wondered if bacteria could be involved in the pathogenesis of some of the septic shock-like symptoms typical of EBOV infected patients, something that could have a dramatic impact on the design of new treatment approaches. We decided to search for bacteria in available EBOV patient sequence datasets. Given that EBOV is an RNA virus and that, hence, some NGS sequencing experiments carried out to sequence the EBOV genomes were RNA-Seq experiments, we thought that, if there were any bacteria in patient serum, at least some bacterial RNA might probably be detected in the sequenced material from Ebola patients. Thus, we searched for bacteria in a RNA-Seq public dataset from 99 Ebola samples from the last outbreak4, and surprisingly, in spite of the certainly suboptimal experimental conditions for bacterial RNA sequencing, we found bacteria in all of the 99 samples