Today’s Digest features new insights into the microbial communities associated with shisha (water pipe), microbial mats, and tropical marine ecosystems. In addition, there are some new techniques and benchmarks to read about, including domain intelligible models for mining ‘omics data and the potential of giant viruses to introduce errors into metagenomic binning. I also highlighted some non-microbiology picks about the potential role for robots in autism therapies and photographs of a brand new planet taken at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy!

Human gut microbiome
Faecal microbiota transplantation alters gut microbiota in patients with irritable bowel syndrome: results from a randomised, double-blind placebo-controlled study – Sofie Ingdam Halkjær – Gut

Animal experiments
Early-life sickness may predispose Siberian hamsters to behavioral changes following alterations of the gut microbiome in adulthood – Kristyn E. Sylvia – Brain, Behavior, and Immunity

Deficiency in class III PI3-kinase confers postnatal lethality with IBD-like features in zebrafish – Shaoyang Zhao – Nature Communications

Plant, root, and soil microbiome
Shisha microbiota: the good, the bad and the not so ugly – Julia Hani – BMC Research Notes

Disentangling the drivers of functional complexity at the metagenomic level in Shark Bay microbial mat microbiomes – Hon Lun Wong – The ISME Journal

Water and extremophile microbiome
A long-standing complex tropical dipole shapes marine microbial biogeography – Wei Yan – Applied and Environmental Microbiology

Probiotics / prebiotics
Probiotic Lactobacillus paracasei HII01 protects rats against obese-insulin resistance-induced kidney injury and impaired renal organic anion transporter 3 (Oat3) function – Keerati Wanchai – Clinical Science

Bioinformatics
Domain Intelligible Models – Sultan Imangaliyev – Methods

Techniques
Metagenomic binning reconstruction coupled with automatic pipeline annotation and giant viruses: a potential source of mistake in annotations – Julien Andreani – Virus Research

Does universal 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing of environmental communities provide an accurate description of nitrifying guilds? – Vaibhav Diwan – Journal of Microbiological Methods

Linking uncultivated microbial populations with benthic carbon turnover using quantitative stable isotope probing – Ömer K. Coskun – Applied and Environmental Microbiology

Determining lineage-specific bacterial growth curves with a novel approach based on amplicon reads normalization using internal standard (ARNIS) – Kasia Piwosz – The ISME Journal

Alyson’s non-microbiology picks
Personalized machine learning for robot perception of affect and engagement in autism therapy – Ognjen Rudovic – Science Robotics

Scientists Capture First Birth Of A Planet – M. Keppler – via NPR