Today’s digest covers a variety of topics including an interesting preprint on how the maternal immune system shapes offspring immunity in a microbiota dependent fashion and a large human study of the Rotavirus vaccine and gut microbiota. Non microbiology picks cover some recent COVID-19 advances and a very interesting article in Science investigating energy expenditure through the human life course.

COVID-19 

No evidence of human genome integration of SARS-CoV-2 found by long-read DNA sequencing – Smits et al. Cell Reports

Ultrapotent antibodies against diverse and highly transmissible SARS-CoV-2 variants. Wang et al. Science 

Long-term perturbation of the peripheral immune system months after SARS-CoV-2 infection -Ryan et al. MedRxiv

General microbiome

Bacterial colonization dynamics and antibiotic resistance gene dissemination in the hospital environment after first patient occupancy: a longitudinal metagenetic study – Klassert et al. Microbiome

Acute SARS-CoV-2 infection is associated with an increased abundance of bacterial pathogens, including Pseudomonas aeruginosa in the nose – Rhoades et al. Cell Reports 

Meta-analysis of Clinical Microbiome Studies in Urolithiasis Reveal Age, Stone Composition, and Study Location as the Predominant Factors in Urolithiasis-Associated Microbiome Composition – mBio. Kachroo et al. 

Human gut microbiome

The fecal microbiome and rotavirus vaccine immunogenicity in rural Zimbabwean infants – Robertson et al. Vaccine

Gut microbiome ADP-ribosyltransferases are widespread phage-encoded fitness factors – Brown et al. Cell Host & Microbe

Pregnancy and Early-Life

Maternal γδ T Cells Shape Offspring Pulmonary Type-2 Immunity In A Microbiota-Dependent Manner – Papotto et al. BioRxiv

Food Microbiology

Functional strain redundancy and persistent phage infection in Swiss hard cheese starter cultures – Somerville et al. ISME

Water Microbiome

Ecogenomics and Adaptation Strategies of Southern Ocean Viral Communities – Alarcón-Schumacher et al. mSystems

Soil microbiome

Bog ecosystems as a playground for plant–microbe coevolution: bryophytes and vascular plants harbour functionally adapted bacteria – Wicaksono et al. Microbiome

Bioinformatics

HoPhage: an ab initio tool for identifying hosts of phage fragments from metaviromes. Tan et al. Bioinformatics

Sparse least trimmed squares regression with compositional covariates for high dimensional data. Monti and Filzmoser. Bioinformatics. 

Ribovore: ribosomal RNA sequence analysis for GenBank submissions and database curation. Schaffer et al. BMC Bioinformatics.

Non-microbiome picks

Daily energy expenditure through the human life course – Pontzer et al. Science

Analysis of scientific society honors reveals disparities – Le et al. Cell Systems