December 14, 2015

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Not a lot of papers today; NCBI’s PubMed alerts has not come out for a couple of days (I will probably get an email tomorrow with 200 new papers…..). Today’s main paper is a not-very microbiological paper on the human gut metagenome.

Human gut microbiome

Synthetic long-read sequencing reveals intraspecies diversity in the human microbiome – Volodymyr Kuleshov – Nature Biotechnology

Review: Microbiota–mitochondria inter-talk: consequence for microbiota–host interaction – Yann Saint-Georges-Chaumet – Pathogens and Disease

Animal microbiome

Toward a better understanding of mechanisms of probiotics and prebiotics action in poultry species – K. M. Ajuwon – Journal of Applied Poultry Research

Microbes in the news

Not sure what is stunning about the diversity they found but: Stunning diversity of gut bacteria uncovered by new approach to gene sequencing devised at Stanford – Jennie Dusheck – Stanford Medicine News Center

Bacteriophage: The Microscopic Black Market – Stefan Rollnick – Huffington Post

Intestinal bacteria are in command – Gemma K. Alderton – Nature Reviews Immunology

The bacteria among us – Jeffrey Perkel – Biotechniques

Antibiotic Use in Food Animals Continues to Rise: Soaring levels of drug use in livestock fuels concern about resistant bacteria, human health – Tom Polansek – Scientific American

Cambridge’s Seres targets ulcerative colitis with new drug based on gut bacteria – Don Seiffert – Boston Business Journal

Altered microbiome burns fewer calories – Study links changes in gut bacteria to lower resting metabolic rate and weight gain in mice – EurekAlert

“How microbial communities interact. It’s kind of like in economics”
Economies of Ail: How Bacteria Flourish – Jo Craven McGinty – Wall Street Journal (subscription required)
Shorter version here that does not require subscription:
Can economics explain our gut microbiome? – Genetic Literacy Project

World’s First Microbiome Fund Swells to €160M With Major Pharma Also Chipping In – LabioTech

Science, publishing, and career

Law ignored, patients at risk: failure to report results of human studies to ClinicalTrials.gov database – Charles Piller – STAT news
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3 thoughts on “December 14, 2015”

  1. Does anyone have any references and/or thoughts on the relationship between microbiomes and a person’s sense of smell? (e.g., not your body odors, but rather how well you perceive smells). Thanks.

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  2. Great question. Microbes are probably not directly influencing our sense of smell, but they certainly can release certain volatile compounds that we otherwise would not be able to smell. In yesterday’s digest I included a news article about this:

    Does That Wine Smell Good? Bacteria in Your Saliva Deserve Some of the Credit – Kasey Carpenter – Wine Spectator
    http://www.winespectator.com/webfeature/show/id/52478

    Here is some literature on how our mouth bacteria can release aroma’s from wine. I have not yet seen papers on releasing smells from other food/drink sources, but that would not surprise me if they could. Here are the wine/saliva papers:

    1. Ability of human oral microbiota to produce wine odorant aglycones from odourless grape glycosidic aroma precursors – Carolina Muñoz-González – Food Chemistry, November 2015
    http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0308814615006147

    2. Understanding the role of saliva on aroma release from wine by using static and dynamic headspace conditions – Carolina Muñoz-González – Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry – July 2014
    http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jf503503b

    3. Saliva from Obese Individuals Suppresses the Release of Aroma Compounds from Wine – Paola Piombino – PLOS ONE – January 2014
    http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0085611

    4. Simulation of retronasal aroma of white and red wine in a model mouth system. Investigating the influence of saliva on volatile compound concentrations –
    Alessandro Genovese – Food Chemistry, May 2009
    http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0308814608010959

    And, for cockroaches, gut bacteria helps their poop smell good to other cockroaches.

    Gut bacteria mediate aggregation in the German cockroach – Ayako Wada-Katsumata – PNAS – December 2015
    http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/12/01/1504031112.abstract

    Then, there are many papers on how microbes are used in the food industry to add specific aromas or flavors. I will include some in the Microbiome Papers Collection pages.

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