The human body hosts countless microorganisms that play diverse roles in health and disease. However, the lack of tools capable of investigating these host–microbiota interactions at large scale has left many of them undiscovered. Writing in Nature, Sonnert et al. developed and validated a tool, named BASEHIT, to map the broad interplay between bacteria and human proteins. BASEHIT identified an extensive network with thousands of newly discovered host–microbe interactions, providing insights into the microbial impact on human physiology.
As microorganisms live in the extracellular space of the human host, BASEHIT was specifically developed to examine the binding of microbial cells to extracellular and secreted proteins. The authors created a library of bacteria incubated with barcoded yeast clones, each displaying an individual human exoprotein. By isolating, sequencing and identifying bacteria–yeast complexes, BASEHIT assembled an extensive atlas of interactions spanning several tissues.
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