Impact of bead-beating intensity on microbiome recovery in mouse and human stool: Optimization of DNA extraction

DNA extraction methods play an important role in the acquisition of accurate and reproducible 16S sequencing data in microbiome studies. In this study, we assessed the impact of bead-beating intensity during DNA extraction on microbiome recovery in mouse and human stool. We observed a higher DNA yield, better DNA integrity, higher  Shannon’s entropy  and  Simpson’s index  in samples beaten for 4 and 9 minutes as compared to unbeaten samples. 16S sequencing data showed that bead beating has a statistically-significant (p