Today’s digest features shallow shotgun sequencing as a useful alternative to 16S sequencing, soil metaproteomics, virus genomes from deep sea sediments, and more. And there’s an important news: the MicroMundo has been launched in Portugal! Happy reading!

Events and jobs

Open Rank Faculty Position in Microbiome or Microbial Systems Research, Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, TX

Physalia courses: 16S/ITS Metabarcoding of microbial communities (Berlin, 1-5 April 2019) Instructors: Anna Sandionigi, Antti Karkman, Bruno Fosso

Physalia courses: Metagenomics (Berlin, 27-31 May 2019) Instructors: Dr. Curtis Huttenhower, Melanie Schirmer, Cesar Arze

Gut microbiome

Metagenomics-Based, Strain-Level Analysis of Escherichia coli From a Time-Series of Microbiome Samples From a Crohn’s Disease Patient – Xin Fang – Front. Microbio.

Preprint: Microbial Dysbiosis and polyamine metabolism as predictive markers for early detection during progression of pancreatic adenocarcinoma in spontaneous mouse model – Roberto Mendez – bioRxiv

Oral microbiome

Preprint: Tobacco exposure associated with oral microbiota oxygen utilization in the New York City Health and Nutrition Examination Study – Francesco Beghini – bioRxiv

Preprint: Sociodemographic patterning in the oral microbiome of a diverse sample of New Yorkers – Audrey Renson – bioRxiv

Soil microbiome

*Review: Using proteins to study how microbes contribute to soil ecosystem services: The current state and future perspectives of soil metaproteomics – Robert Starke – Journal of Proteomics

Phages and viruses

Degenerate PCR Primers to Reveal the Diversity of Giant Viruses in Coastal Waters  – Yanze Li – Viruses

*Preprint: Virus genomes from deep sea sediments expand the ocean megavirome and support independent origins of viral gigantism – Disa Backstrom – bioRxiv

Bioinformatics

*Evaluating the Information Content of Shallow Shotgun Metagenomics – Benjamin Hillmann – MySystems

A novel method to accurately calculate statistical significance of local similarity analysis for high-throughput time series – Fang Zhang – Stat Appl Genet Mol Biol.

KrakenUniq: confident and fast metagenomics classification using unique k-mer counts – Breitwieser Florian – Genome Biol.

MetaMap: an atlas of metatranscriptomic reads in human disease-related RNA-seq data –Simon Lucas – Gigascience

Svetlana’s microbiology pick

* Last week was World Antibiotic Awareness Week and the MicroMundo project has been launched in Portugal:
Initially created in the USA (2012) as Small World Initiative, the MicroMundo is an innovative Citizen Science project where professors and researchers from the University of Porto encourage students to pursue career in science while addressing a worldwide health threat – antibiotic resistance.