God morgon!

Good morning from Sweden. Today’s digest is a light one but carries a preprint with some very important findings. The study has suggested that the nCoV can potentially hijack the immune system completely by infecting the lymphocytes. This might lead to impaired antibody and T-cell response, something that could have a serious implication on the success of the much-awaited vaccine. (Unfortunately, for some unknown reasons, the PDF of the preprint is inaccessible to me! Let me know down in the comments if you are able to download it.)

A new paper in BMC microbiome shows a correlation between the indoor dust microbiota and the microbiota of infant airways. A classic example of how our environment impacts our health.  There is another interesting preprint where the authors show that a fungus alters its virulence when it is challenged by predatory amoebae. Perhaps the amoeba challenge selects for the warrior mutants which then carry on their warring ways!

Elsewhere in the digest is a preprint where Plasmodium knowlesi was used as a model to successfully determine new vaccine targets against more dangerous Plasmodium vivax, a paper detailing the effect of polar light cycles on the Antarctic lake microbiome, and identification of haloarchael species in Korean gut microbiota.

COVID-19

Preprint: Infection of human lymphomononuclear cells by SARS-CoV-2 – Marjorie C Pontelli, et al.

General Microbiology

Preprint: Amoeba predation of Cryptococcus neoformans results in pleiotropic changes to traits associated with virulence – Man Shun Fu, et al.

Preprint: Using Plasmodium knowlesi as a model for screening Plasmodium vivax blood-stage malaria vaccine targets reveals new candidates – Duncan N Ndegwa, et al.

General microbiome

Influence of the polar light cycle on seasonal dynamics of an Antarctic lake microbial community – Pratibha Panwar, et al. – Microbiome

Environmental shaping of the bacterial and fungal community in infant bed dust and correlations with the airway microbiota – Shashank Gupta, et al. – Microbiome

Archaea/Gut microbiota

The human gut archaeome: identification of diverse haloarchaea in Korean subjects – Joon Yong Kim, et al. – Microbiome

Techniques

Preprint: Successful introduction of the Colour Test into inexperienced settings – Kadri Klaos

Zoom Seminar

How a healthy gut microbe affects your whole body? – Karen Ranzi, Holistic Health Coach, Award-Winning Author, Motivational Speaker, Natural Foods Chef, Speech and Feeding Therapist (phew!)