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Free keywords:
Rheumatoid arthritis; Microbiota; Methods
Abstract:
Most autoimmune diseases are polygenic conditions, with strong environmental components. For example, rheumatoid arthritis (RA) has approximately 100 risk alleles, with small individual effect sizes, indicating interaction of environmental factors with genetic susceptibilities in disease development (Okada et al., Nature 506:376--381, 2014). A theme throughout this textbook is the association of microbial populations with disease development. The last 10 years have witnessed an explosion of technologies and informatics pipelines permitting in-depth exploration of these microbial communities. Thus, it is important to investigate microbial communities in autoimmune diseases like RA in a systematic and comparable way to find common dynamics in the microbiome within and across studies that may lead to diagnostic or therapeutic innovations. The previous chapter reviewed multiple technologies, old and new, to query the microbiota; this chapter will focus on the analysis of commonly used sequencing approaches.
