Microbial Population Differentials between Mucosal and Submucosal Intestinal Tissues in Advanced Crohn's Disease of the Ileum

Since Crohn's disease is a transmural disease, we hypothesized that examination of deep submucosal tissues directly involved in the inflammatory disease process may provide unique insights into bacterial populations transgressing intestinal barriers and bacterial populations more representative of the causes and agents of the disease. We performed deep 16s microbiota sequencing on isolated ilea mucosal and submucosal tissues on 20 patients with Crohn's disease and 15 non-inflammatory bowel disease controls with a depth of coverage averaging 81,500 sequences in each of the 70 DNA samples yielding an overall resolution down to 0.0001% of the bacterial population. Of the 4,802,328 total sequences generated, 98.9% or 4,749,183 sequences aligned with the Kingdom Bacteria that clustered into 8545 unique sequences with