Bacterial Wars-a tool for the prediction of bacterial predominance based on network analysis measures

Anastasis Oulas; George Minadakis; Margarita Zachariou; Marios Tomazou; Alexios Vlamis-Gardikas; George M Spyrou

doi:10.1093/nargab/lqad049

Bacterial Wars-a tool for the prediction of bacterial predominance based on network analysis measures

NAR Genom Bioinform. 2023 May 30;5(2):lqad049. doi: 10.1093/nargab/lqad049. eCollection 2023 Jun.

Authors

Anastasis Oulas¹, George Minadakis¹, Margarita Zachariou¹, Marios Tomazou¹, Alexios Vlamis-Gardikas², George M Spyrou¹

Affiliations

¹ Cyprus Institute of Neurology and Genetics, Bioinformatics Department, 6 International Airport Avenue, 2370 Nicosia, Cyprus, P.O.Box 23462, 1683, Nicosia, Cyprus.
² Department of Chemistry, Division of Organic Chemistry, Biochemistry and Natural Products, University of Patras, 26504, Rion, Greece.

Abstract

Bacterial Wars (BW) is a network-based tool that applies a two-step pipeline to display information on the competition of bacterial species found in the same microbiome. It utilizes antimicrobial peptide (AMP) sequence similarities to obtain a relationship between species. The working hypothesis (putative AMP defense) is that friendly species share sequence similarity among the putative AMPs of their proteomes and are therefore immune to their AMPs. This may not happen in competing bacterial species with dissimilar putative AMPs. Similarities in the putative AMPs of bacterial proteomes may be thus used to predict predominance. The tool provides insights as to which bacterial species are more likely to 'die' in a competing environmental niche.