Happy almost Friday from the US’s west coast, everybody! I recently finished reading “Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants” by Robin Wall Kimmerer and plants have been on my mind so today’s Digest is heavy on the plant microbiome research. Two plant papers I found especially fascinating applied different experimental designs to study the same issue: one looks at how the mono-cropping of maize negatively impacts soil microbial communities and the other found that sugarcane/peanut intercropping enriches for beneficial microbes that promote nitrogen and phosphate release from the soil. There are also several papers looking at the relationship between microbes and the host immune system and an eLife paper in which the popular shelter-in-place hobby of making sourdough and our beloved microbiome field collide. Happy reading!

Pregnancy and Early Life
Fecal Microbiota Nutrient Utilization Potential Suggests Mucins as Drivers for Initial Gut Colonization of Mother-Child Shared Bacteria. – Nilsen, M. et al., Applied and Environmental Microbiology.

Metagenomic insights of the infant microbiome community structure and function across multiple sites in the United States. – Casaburi, G. et al., Scientific Reports.

Human Gut Microbiome
Gut bacteria-derived 5-hydroxyindole is a potent stimulant of intestinal motility via its action on L-type calcium channels. – Waclawiková, B. et al., PLoS Biology.

Animal Experiments
Gut CD4+ T cell phenotypes are a continuum molded by microbes, not by TH archetypes. – Kiner, E. et al., Nature Immunology.

Regulation of Gut Microbiota Disrupts the Glucocorticoid Receptor Pathway and Inflammation-related Pathways in the Mouse Hippocampus. – Rao, X. et al., Experimental Neurobiology.

Decreased Ecological Resistance of the Gut Microbiota in Response to Clindamycin Challenge in Mice Colonized with the Fungus Candida albicans. – Markey, L. et al., mSphere.

Gut Commensal Segmented Filamentous Bacteria Fine-Tune T Follicular Regulatory Cells to Modify the Severity of Systemic Autoimmune Arthritis. – Bates, N.A. et al., Journal of Immunology.

Microbial metabolism of L-tyrosine protects against allergic airway inflammation. – Wypych, T.P. et al., Nature Immunology.

Animal Microbiome
Host development overwhelms environmental dispersal in governing the ecological succession of zebrafish gut microbiota. – Xiao, F. et al., npj Biofilms and Microbiomes.

Quantifying fluorescent glycan uptake to elucidate strain-level variability in foraging behaviors of rumen bacteria. – Klassen, L. et al., Microbiome.

Plant, Root, and Soil Microbiome
Complementary Roles of Wood-Inhabiting Fungi and Bacteria Facilitate Deadwood Decomposition. – Tláskal, V. et al., mSystems.

Natural Bacterial Assemblages in Arabidopsis thaliana Tissues Become More Distinguishable and Diverse during Host Development. – Beilsmith, K. et al., mBio.

Colonization of naïve roots from Populus tremula x alba involves successive waves of fungi and bacteria with different trophic abilities. – Fracchia, F. et al., Applied and Environmental Microbiology.

The role of host promiscuity in the invasion process of a seaweed holobiont. – Bonthond, G. et al., The ISME Journal.

Sugarcane/peanut intercropping system improves the soil quality and increases the abundance of beneficial microbes. – Tang, X. et al., Journal of Basic Microbiology.

Variation of rhizosphere microbial community in continuous mono-maize seed production. – Zhao, Y. et al., Scientific Reports.

Food Microbiology
The diversity and function of sourdough starter microbiomes. – Landis, E.A. et al., eLife.

Probiotics
Optimization of probiotic therapeutics using machine learning in an artificial human gastrointestinal tract. – Westfall, S. et al., Scientific Reports.

Metagenomics
How reliably do metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs) represent natural populations? Insights from comparing MAGs against isolate genomes derived from the same fecal sample. – Meziti, A. et al., Applied and Environmental Microbiology.

Techniques
Precision modification of the human gut microbiota targeting surface-associated proteins. – Marcos-Fernández, R. et al., Scientific Reports.

High-throughput cultivation and identification of bacteria from the plant root microbiota. – Zhang, J. et al., Nature Protocols.