Effect of Stool Transportation Conditions on Microbiota Diversity

Nucleic acid (NA) based applications are a powerful tool driving research in the area of human cancer marker discovery, pathogen diagnosis and genetic testing. These nucleic acids are isolated from many different human specimens, and it is known that the method of sample transportation prior to nucleic acid purification can influences the sample’s stability, greatly affecting the NA contents and therefore resulting in data variability.  Despite this knowledge, however, the importance of sample preservation and transportation has not been extensively studied before. Therefore, this study focuses on the effect of transportation conditions, particularly temperature fluctuation, on microbiota diversity in human stool. A number of different microbial targets were monitored by qPCR from stool samples exposed to 5 different temperatures, with and without the addition of a stool NA preservative (Norgen Biotek Corp.).  The results indicate an intriguing observation in that the population of a certain microorganism was affected by the temperature and the incubation time, resulting in variability of the microbial population analysis as demonstrated by qPCR.