Happy New Year again!

Last week, I asked you all to vote for the best microbiome papers of 2017. And just like the previous year, we have a very clear winner. A paper that had some obvious help from the author’s Facebook friends, who all wrote in to vote 🙂

Full disclosure: I was the handling editor of this paper.

The winner is…. (drumroll)….

• Exposure to household furry pets influences the gut microbiota of infants at 3–4 months following various birth scenarios – Hein M. Tun – Microbiome

Second place was won by:

• Cesarean Section, Formula Feeding, and Infant Antibiotic Exposure: Separate and Combined Impacts on Gut Microbial Changes in Later Infancy – Farzana Yasmin – Frontiers in Pediatrics

And in shared third/fourth place:

• Systematic Characterization and Analysis of the Taxonomic Drivers of Functional Shifts in the Human Microbiome – Ohad Manor – Cell Host & Microbe
• Tunable Expression Tools Enable Single-Cell Strain Distinction in the Gut Microbiome – Weston R. Whitaker – Cell

Other nominees were:

• Identification of 76 novel B1 metallo-β-lactamases through large-scale screening of genomic and metagenomic data – Fanny Berglund – Microbiome
• Large-scale differences in microbial biodiversity discovery between 16S amplicon and shotgun sequencing – Michael Tessler – Scientific Reports
• A geographically-diverse collection of 418 human gut microbiome pathway genome databases – Aria S. Hahn – Scientific Data
• Seasonal cycling in the gut microbiome of the Hadza hunter-gatherers of Tanzania – Samuel A. Smits – Science
• Long-term stability in the gut microbiome over 46 years in the life of Billy Apple® – Thilini N.Jayasinghe – Human Microbiome Journal
• Recovery of nearly 8,000 metagenome-assembled genomes substantially expands the tree of life – Donovan H. Parks – Nature Microbiology
• Critical Assessment of Metagenome Interpretation—a benchmark of metagenomics software – Alexander Sczyrba – Nature Methods
• Timing of food intake impacts daily rhythms of human salivary microbiota: a randomized, crossover study – Maria Carmen Collado – FASEB Journal
• The Human Salivary Microbiome Is Shaped by Shared Environment Rather than Genetics: Evidence from a Large Family of Closely Related Individuals – Liam Shaw – mBio
• Moving beyond microbiome-wide associations to causal microbe identification
  – Neeraj K. Surana – Nature
• Priority effects can persist across floral generations in nectar microbial meta-communities– T Hirokazu – Oikos
• Efficient Hydrogen-Dependent Carbon Dioxide Reduction by Escherichia coli –
  Magali Roger – Current Biology
• A communal catalogue reveals Earth’s multiscale microbial diversity – Luke R. Thompson – Nature
• Colonic Butyrate-producing communities in Humans – an overview using Omics data – Marius Vital – mSystems
• Towards standards for human fecal sample processing in metagenomic studies – Paul I Costea – Nature Biotechnology
• Towards a balanced view of the bacterial tree of life – Frederik Schulz – Microbiome

I wish you all the best for the new year! Hopefully, 2018 will bring even more great microbiome science papers.