Bacteria are the unseen majority on our planet, with millions of species and
comprising most of the living protoplasm. While current methods enable in-depth
study of a small number of communities, a simple tool for breadth studies of
bacterial population composition in a large number of samples is lacking. We
propose a novel approach for reconstruction of the composition of an unknown
mixture of bacteria using a single Sanger-sequencing reaction of the mixture.
This method is based on compressive sensing theory, which deals with
reconstruction of a sparse signal using a small number of measurements.
Utilizing the fact that in many cases each bacterial community is comprised of
a small subset of the known bacterial species, we show the feasibility of this
approach for determining the composition of a bacterial mixture. Using
simulations, we show that sequencing a few hundred base-pairs of the 16S rRNA
gene sequence may provide enough information for reconstruction of mixtures
containing tens of species, out of tens of thousands, even in the presence of
realistic measurement noise. Finally, we show initial promising results when
applying our method for the reconstruction of a toy experimental mixture with
five species. Our approach may have a potential for a practical and efficient
way for identifying bacterial species compositions in biological samples.Comment: 28 pages, 12 figure