Maternal HIV status and infant microbiome development, nose bacteria producing antibiotics, gases produced by gut microbes, microbial mats in Hawaiian lava caves.

Pregnancy and birth

Maternal HIV infection influences the microbiome of HIV-uninfected infants – Jeffrey M. Bender – Science Translational Medicine

Press: Maternal HIV status may disrupt normal microbiome development in uninfected infants – Medical Xpress

Human respiratory microbiome

Human commensals producing a novel antibiotic impair pathogen colonization – Alexander Zipperer – Nature

Press: Scientists are looking everywhere, and we mean everywhere, for new antibiotics – Katherine Ellen Foley – Quartz
Nose-Dwelling Bacteria Could Be Antibiotic Factories, Study Says – Robert Lee Hotz – Wall Street Journal

Human vaginal microbiome

Desialylation of Neisseria gonorrhoeae Lipooligosaccharide by Cervicovaginal Microbiome Sialidases: The Potential for Enhancing Infectivity in Men – Margaret R. Ketterer – Journal of Infectious Diseases

Does the cervicovaginal microbiome facilitate transmission of Neisseria gonorrhoeae from women to men? Implications for understanding transmission of gonorrhea and advancing vaccine development – William M. Shafer – Journal of Infectious Diseases

Human gut microbiome

Review: Neuromodulatory effects and targets of the SCFAs and gasotransmitters produced by the human symbiotic microbiota –  Alexander V. Oleskin – Microbial Ecology in Health and Disease

Press: Explosive new findings: Farting shown to play a role in regulating your brain and behavior – Kelly Hodgkins – Yahoo Tech

Review: Progress in Our Understanding of the Gut Microbiome: Implications for the Clinician – Sara Iqbal – Current Gastroenterology Reports

 
Animal microbiome

Testosterone levels are positively correlated with cloacal bacterial diversity and the relative abundance of Chlamydiae in breeding male rufous-collared sparrows – Camilo Escallón – Functional Ecology

Review: The rich somatic life of Wolbachia – Jose E. Pietri – MicrobiologyOpen

Plant, root, and soil microbiome

Diversity of root-associated arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal communities in a rubber tree plantation chronosequence in Northeast Thailand – Laetitia Herrmann – Mycorrhiza

Bromeliad tanks are unique habitats for microbial communities involved in methane turnover – Franziska B. Brandt – Plant and Soil

Soil compartment is a major determinant of the impact of simulated rainfall on desert microbiota – Shazia N. Aslam – Environmental Microbiology

Assessing Fungal Population in Soil Planted with Cry1Ac and CPTI Transgenic Cotton and Its Conventional Parental Line Using 18S and ITS rDNA Sequences over Four Seasons – Xiemin Qi – Frontiers in Plant Science

Systems-level proteomics of two ubiquitous leaf commensals reveals complementary adaptive traits for phyllosphere colonization – Daniel B. Müller – Molecular and Cellular Proteomics

Water and extremophile microbiome

(PDF) Microbial mat communities in Hawaiian lava caves – Michael N. Spilde – International Symposium on Vulcanospeleology

Poster, abstract only: Microbial Diversity of Culinary Salts – Galen Muske – Utah Space Grant Consortium

Built environment microbiome

Influence of carbon sources and concrete on microbially induced corrosion of carbon steel in subterranean groundwater environment – Pauliina Rajala – Corrosion

Bioinformatics and metagenomics

MBMC: An Effective Markov Chain Approach for Binning Metagenomic Reads from Environmental Shotgun Sequencing Projects – Wang Ying – OMICS: A Journal of Integrative Biology

Scalable metagenomics alignment research tool (SMART): a scalable, rapid, and complete search heuristic for the classification of metagenomic sequences from complex sequence populations – Aaron Y. Lee – BMC Bioinformatics

Review: Computational Biology in the 21st Century: Scaling with Compressive Algorithms – Bonnie Berger – Communications of the ACM

Microbes in the news

Five new studies will examine how the trillions of tiny organisms that call our bodies home can impact health – University at Buffalo

NASA releases ‘Microbiomics: The Living World In and On You’ – Video highlights Twins Study microbiome investigation – EurekAlert

The Olympians can leave. Brazil’s poor live with filthy, reeking water every day – Melissa Bailey – STAT News

Bizarre bacteria causing major cattle disease named by researchers – Pajaroellobacter abortibovis causes “foothill abortion disease” –  Science Daily

Bik’s non-microbiology Picks

From Impossible Foods, co-founded by Patrick Brown, a former Stanford professor: Impossible burger: New York’s latest food craze is a veggie burger that bleeds – Amanda Holpuch – The Guardian