To test this hypothesis, we prepared and sequenced 16S ribosomal DNA amplicons from lung tissue samples and used oligotyping, a computational method with high resolution (Eren et al., 2013, 2014) to distinguish microbial communities in fibrotic tissues from patients with IPF and transforming growth factor (TGF)-β1 transgenic mice with pulmonary fibrosis. This evidence concerns the gene TGFB1 and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.