In today’s digest read about the presence/absence of ACBP orthologues in human gut metagenomes and how the gut microbiome links nutrition with cardiometabolic health, LEGO-based microscope, SIAMCAT for statistical inference of associations between microbial communities and host phenotypes, bacteriophage plaques size tool, and more. Check out a list of awesome webinars and courses. Happy Friday!

OPEN #NSURP2021 CALL for mentors and mentees: The National Summer Undergraduate Research Project – A community-driven initiative to create rewarding remote summer research opportunities for BIPOC and Latinx undergraduate students in the microbial sciences.

Microbiome in the news

*Microbiome research in general and business newspapers: How many microbiome articles are published and which study designs make the news the most? – Andreu Prados-Bo and Gonzalo Casino – PlosOne

General

Prokaryotic taxonomy and nomenclature in the age of big sequence data – Philip Hugenholtz – The ISME Journal

The metabolic network of the last bacterial common ancestor – Joana C. Xavier – Communications Biology

Techniques

*Designing a high-resolution, LEGO-based microscope for an educational setting – Bart Eduard Vos – bioRxiv

Genome-Based Targeted Sequencing as a Reproducible Microbial Community Profiling Assay – Jacquelynn Benjamino – mSphere

Gut microbiome

*Microbial ACBP/DBI-like genes are rare in the human gut microbiome and show no links with obesity – Andrew Maltez Thomas – Applied and Environmental Microbiology

The long-term genetic stability and individual specificity of the human gut microbiome – Lianmin Chen – Cell

Review: Emulating the gut–liver axis: Dissecting the microbiome’s effect on drug metabolism using multiorgan-on-chip models – Mara Lucchetti – Current Opinion in Endocrine and Metabolic Research

Urinary microbiome

The human urobiome – Linda Brubaker – Mammalian Genome

Urinary microbiota of women with recurrent urinary tract infection: collection and culture methods – Baylie R. Hochstedler – International Urogynecology Journal

Vaginal microbiome

Characterization of the first vaginal Lactobacillus crispatus genomes isolated in Brazil – Marcelle Oliveira de Almeida – PeerJ

Comparative Genome Analyses of Lactobacillus crispatus Isolates from Different Ecological Niches Reveal an Adaptation of This Species to the Human Vaginal Environment – Leonardo Mancabelli – Applied and Environmental Microbiology

Probiotics

Review: Lacticaseibacillus rhamnosus GR-1, a.k.a. Lactobacillus rhamnosus GR-1: Past and Future Perspectives – Mariya I.Petrova – Trends in Microbiology

Probiotic Lactobacillus sp. Strains Inhibit Growth, Adhesion, Biofilm Formation, and Gene Expression of Bacterial Vaginosis-Inducing Gardnerella vaginalis – Zhixiang Qian – Microorganisms

Oral microbiome

Dental biofilm microbiota dysbiosis is associated with the risk of acute graft-versus-host disease after allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation – Vitor Heidrich – medRxiv

Soil microbiome

Shotgun metagenomics reveals distinct functional diversity and metabolic capabilities between 12 000-year-old permafrost and active layers on Muot da Barba Peider (Swiss Alps) – Carla Perez-Mon – Microbial Genomics

Phages and viruses

*Plaque Size Tool: an automated plaque analysis tool for simplifying and standardising bacteriophage plaque morphology measurements – Ellina Trofimova and Paul R Jaschke – bioRxiv

The gut virome of healthy children during the first year of life is diverse and dynamic – Blanca Taboada – PlosOne

Bioinformatics

Taxonomic analysis of metagenomic data with kASA – Silvio Weging – Nucleic Acids Research

*Microbiome meta-analysis and cross-disease comparison enabled by the SIAMCAT machine learning toolbox – Jakob Wirbel – Genome Biology

Review: Integrating pan-genome with metagenome for microbial community profiling – Chaofang Zhong – Computational and Structural Biotechnology Journal

Connecting structure to function with the recovery of over 1000 high-quality metagenome-assembled genomes from activated sludge using long-read sequencing – Caitlin M. Singleton – Nature Communications

Evaluation of the effects of library preparation procedure and sample characteristics on the accuracy of metagenomic profiles – Christopher Gaulke – bioRxiv

Democratising deep learning for microscopy with ZeroCostDL4Mic – Lucas von Chamier – Nature Communications

Webinars

Offered talks on Plasmids and Mobile Elements for 2021 – Plasmids around the globe – International Society for Plasmid Biology and Other Mobile Genetic Elements

Spring 2021 Microbiome Informatics webinars – OSU Center of Microbiome Science

EMBARK Spring Webinars – AMR focused webinars – EMBARK project

BISMiS Live – Microbial taxonomy: where are we now and where are we going? Iain Sutcliffe – Bergey’s Intl. Society for Microbial Systematics; registration here

Berkeley Lab Live Science – Exploring Earth – Berkeley Lab – April 23

Conferences

ISAPP 2021 Virtual Annual Meeting – International Scientific Association for Probiotics and Prebiotics – June 1–2

Courses

Open Online R Stream – Wolfgang Viechtbauer

RaukR: Advanced R for Bioinformatics Summer School – NBIS/SciLifeLab – June 14-24