Establishing procedures for 16S metagenomics analysis of urine.

Metagenomics is a fairly new field with many different approaches, and the need for establishing good procedures is existent. Recently, metagenomics has been used in research regarding resident flora in urine from healthy subjects. Urine, being a material with small amounts of cells, presents challenges to any method of analysis. This is why it is a good alternative in testing the quality of the procedures that are established. In the thesis, procedures for 16S metagenomics analysis of urine are established, and changes for future application of the procedures are suggested. Urine was collected from ten healthy male subjects, and tested by 16S metagenomics analysis on the Ion Torrent PGM. Series of cultivated and uncultivated samples were set up, and the uncultivated ones provided no results, whereas the cultivated ones showed a dominance of Corynebacterium, Bacilli, Firmicutes, Lactobacilliales, and Enterococcaceae. The results proved the established procedures to be functional in cultivated samples, but metagenomics for liquid urine still needs optimization