Korem, T. et al. Science 349, 1101–1106 (2015).

Korem et al. have shown that it is possible to extract information about population growth dynamics from static sequence data. Most bacterial chromosomes are circular, with a single origin that initiates bidirectional replication toward a single terminus. Using chemostat experiments, the authors found that the proportion of DNA copies near the origin to those near the terminus (peak-to-trough ratio (PTR)) can give a quantitative readout of the population growth rate. They extended their approach to metagenomic sequence data and developed a computational pipeline to determine ratios in large cohorts. They measured PTRs to detect the bacteriostatic effects of antibiotics in the mouse gut, to identify human gut bacteria that oscillate in growth or respond to diet changes, to profile growth rates on human body sites and to identify bacterial growth associated with bowel disease.

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