Extracellular vesicle-derived microbiome obtained from exhaled breath
condensate in patients with asthma
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Despite the construction of the metagenome of the asthmatic
lung, limitations persist in sampling the bronchial airway. This study
analyzed extracellular vesicles (EVs) obtained from exhaled breath
condensate (EBC) to compare the distinct characteristics of the
microbiome in asthmatics with those in healthy controls and proposed a
diagnostic artificial intelligence-based model of asthma. METHODS: We
obtained the EBC from 58 healthy controls and 251 patients with asthma.
EVs were isolated from the EBC and analyzed. The extracted 16s rDNA was
subjected to next generation sequencing. Taxonomic profiling was
conducted for all samples at the genus level. A combination of
artificial neural network (ANN) and gradient boosting (GBM) was applied
to selective EBC biomarkers. RESULTS: The asthma group exhibited
significantly higher alpha diversity based on the results of the Chao1,
Shannon, and Simpson indices. The bacterial composition of patients with
asthma different from that of the controls. At the genus level,
Sphingomonas, Akkermansia, Methylophaga, Acidocella, and Marinobacter
were significantly more abundant in patients with asthma. The diagnostic
model using GBM and ANN demonstrated good performance with respective
areas under the curve of 0.832 and 0.769. Firmicutes and Proteobacteria
at the phylum level were common important features between the GBM and
ANN asthma models. CONCLUSION: We demonstrated a distinct pattern in the
microbiome of patients with asthma, indicating the potential role of
microbiome-based diagnosis of asthma. To the best of our knowledge, this
was the first study to identify the microbiome in asthma using
EBC-derived EVs.