Category Archives: Microbial Ecology

December 18, 2020

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Greetings from cold and snowy Pittsburgh!

As I type this, my housemate (who is an essential healthcare worker) should be getting the first dose of her COVID-19 vaccine! Although I’m not sure what the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines is expected to look like, today’s digest includes an article mapping routine measles vaccination coverage in low- and middle- income countries. I’ve also highlighted a few interesting environmental microbiology preprints, including one on the role of ecosystem engineers in shaping arid soil bacterial communities.

Happy holidays and happy reading!

Events and jobs

Danone North America Gut Microbiome, Yogurt and Probiotics Fellowship Grant – Applications for the 2020-2021 grant are currently open and are due on February 24, 2021.

General microbiome

Mapping routine measles vaccination in low- and middle-income countries – Local Burden of Disease Vaccine Coverage Collaborators – Nature

The functional proteome landscape of Escherichia coli – Mateus et al. – Nature

Preprint: Niche and local geography shape the pangenome of wastewater- and livestock-associated Enterobacteriaceae – Shaw et al. – bioRxiv


Plant, root, and soil microbiome

Preprint: The role of ecosystem engineers in shaping the diversity and function of arid soil bacterial communities – Baubin et al. – bioRxiv

Preprint: Environmental interactions with amoebae as drivers of bacterial-fungal endosymbiosis and pathogenicity – Itabangi et al. – bioRxiv

December 9, 2020

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In today’s digest read about the selection and microdiversity in glacier-fed streams, Gardnerella vaginalis contribution to the increased rate of group B Streptococcus vaginal colonization, making F1 hybrids in Escherichia coli using MAE (Mass Allelic Exchange), smORFinder (annotation tool to identify small proteins in microbial genomes and metagenomes), and more.
Check out the new Science Friday podcast episode on microbial interactions in cheese rinds and Svetlana’s pick for happy holidays.
Cheers!

Human microbiome

Effects of Extended Postmortem Interval on Microbial Communities in Organs of the Human Cadaver – Holly Lutz – Frontiers in Microbiology

Gut microbiome

Landscapes of bacterial and metabolic signatures and their interaction in major depressive disorders – Jian Yang – Science Advances

Improved high-molecular-weight DNA extraction, nanopore sequencing and metagenomic assembly from the human gut microbiome – Dylan G. Maghini – Nature Protocols

Elucidation of Gut Microbiota-Associated Lipids Using LC-MS/MS and 16S rRNA Sequence Analyses – Shu Yasuda – iScience

The Healthy Microbiome (What is the definition of a healthy gut microbiome?) – Fergus Shanahan – Gastroenterology

The gut microbiota is associated with immune cell dynamics in humans – Jonas Schluter
– Nature

Utilizing the gut microbiome in decompensated cirrhosis and acute-on-chronic liver failure – Jonel Trebicka – Nature Reviews Gastroenterology & Hepatology

Animal microbiome

Remodeling of the maternal gut microbiome during pregnancy is shaped by parity – Alexander SF Berry – bioRxiv

Animal experiments

*Gardnerella vaginalis promotes group B Streptococcus vaginal colonization, enabling ascending uteroplacental infection in pregnant mice – Nicole M. Gilbert – American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology

Akkermansia muciniphila: A potential novel mechanism of nuciferine to improve hyperlipidemia – Yue Yu – Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy

Gut microbiota modulation by both Lactobacillus fermentum MSK 408 and ketogenic diet in a murine model of pentylenetetrazole-induced acute seizure – Ju Young Eor – Epilepsy Research

Host-age prediction from fecal microbiome composition in laboratory mice – Adrian Low – bioRxiv

Commensal Microbiota Regulates Skin Barrier Function And Repair Via Signaling Through The Aryl Hydrocarbon Receptor – Aayushi Uberoi – bioRxiv

Water microbiome

*Homogeneous selection promotes microdiversity in the glacier-fed stream microbiome – Stilianos Fodelianakis – bioRxiv

Phages and viruses

Long-term persistence of crAss-like phage crAss001 is associated with phase variation in Bacteroides intestinalis – Andrey N. Shkoporov – bioRxiv

Diversity and Distribution of a Novel Genus of Hyperthermophilic Aquificae Viruses Encoding a Proof-Reading Family-A DNA Polymerase – Marike Palmer – Frontiers in Microbiology

Broad Virus Detection and Variant Discovery in Fecal Samples of Hematopoietic Transplant Recipients Using Targeted Sequence Capture Metagenomics – Suze A. Jansen – Frontiers in Microbiology

Antimicrobial Resistance

Review: Multidrug-resistant high-risk Enterococcus faecium clones: can we really define them? – Ana R. Freitas – International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents

Review: Current Trends in Experimental and Computational Approaches to Combat Antimicrobial Resistance – Madangchanok Imchen – Frontiers in Genetics

Predicting clinical resistance prevalence using sewage metagenomic data – Antti Karkman – Communications Biology

Fermented-Food Metagenomics Reveals Substrate-Associated Differences in Taxonomy and Health-Associated and Antibiotic Resistance Determinants – John Leech – mSystems

Uncovering hidden antimicrobial resistance patterns within the hospital microbiome – Bastiaan W. Haak and W. Joost Wiersinga – Nature Medicine

Isolation and characterization of human pathogenic multidrug resistant bacteria associated with plastic litter collected in Zanzibar – Farah N. Rasool – Journal of Hazardous Materials

Integrated metagenomic and metatranscriptomic analyses of ultraviolet disinfection effects on antibiotic resistance genes and bacterial communities during wastewater treatment – Shuyu Jia – Ecotoxicology

A metagenomic glimpse into the gut of wild and domestic animals: Quantification of antimicrobial resistance and more – Magdalena Skarżyńska – Plos One

Techniques

*Mass allelic exchange: enabling sexual genetics in Escherichia coli – Varnica Khetrapal – bioRxiv

Review: Microbial model communities: To understand complexity, harness the power of simplicity – Johan Bengtsson-Palme – Computational and Structural Biotechnology Journal

MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry for sub-typing of Streptococcus pneumoniae – Sivkheng Kann – BMC Microbiology

Bioinformatics

*Automated Prediction and Annotation of Small Open Reading Frames in Microbial Genomes – Matthew G. Durrant and Ami S. Bhatt – Cell Host Microbe

Accurate Microbiome Sequencing with Synthetic Long Read Sequencing – Nico Chung – bioRxiv

Species level resolution of female bladder microbiota from marker gene surveys – Carter Hoffman – bioRxiv

Synthetic Sequencing Standards: A Guide to Database Choice for Rumen Microbiota Amplicon Sequencing Analysis – Paul E. Smith – Frontiers in Microbiology

Events

H3ABioNet Seminars and Webinars – H3ABioNet Pan African Bioinformatics Network

Inspiring the next generation of scientists… online – The Young Microbiologists Symposium (YMS) 2020

MLCB 2020 Day 1 and 2 talks – Machine Learning in Computational Biology meeting

Podcast

Why We’re Giving Thanks To Microbes For Stinky Cheese with Benjamin Wolfe and Casey Cosetta – Katie Feather and Ira Flatow – Science Friday

Svetlana’s pick

Planning Our “Home-mas” this December – MissPond – Emma Pond

Holiday Gift Guide For Microbe Lovers – Justine Dees – Joyful Microbe

The 2020 cookbook giftlist – Fiona Beckett – Matching Food & Wine

December 3, 2020

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A brief digest for today!! Happy reading!!

General microbiome
Polyester microfiber and natural organic matter impact microbial communities, carbon-degraded enzymes, and carbon accumulation in a clayey soil – Guo et al – Journal of Hazardous Materials

Neglected effect of gas atmosphere on hydrogen production in microbial electrolysis cells – Cui et al – Science of The Total Environment

Multi-site human microbiome
A Role for the Microbiota in the Immune Phenotype Alteration Associated with the Induction of Disease Tolerance and Persistent Asymptomatic Infection of Salmonella in the Chicken – Lee et al – Microorganisms

Human gut microbiome
Review: Sleep and Circadian Disruption and the Gut Microbiome-Possible Links to Dysregulated Metabolism – Withrow et al – Current Opinion in Endocrine and Metabolic Research

Plant, root, and soil microbiome
Composition and functional comparison of vetiver root endophytic microbiota originating from different geographic locations that show antagonistic activity towards Fusarium graminearum – Munakata et al – Microbiological Research

Microbiota Diversity Change as Quality Indicator of Soils Exposed to Intensive Periurban Agriculture – Raiger Iustman et al – Current Microbiology

November 26, 2020

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Greetings from Pittsburgh!

Today’s digest is heavy on environmental microbiology work, especially plant, root, and soil microbiome studies. I also want to highlight a fun research paper (and paired Wired article) on the microbiome of da Vinci’s drawings.

Happy reading! And for all of those in the U.S. who are celebrating the Thanksgiving holiday, please be safe and follow all local COVID precautions.

Multi-site human microbiome

Mycobiome changes in the vitreous of post fever retinitis patients – Arunasri et al. – PLOS ONE

Review: Metabolomics analysis of microbiota-gut-brain axis in neurodegenerative and psychiatric diseases – Konjevod et al. – Journal of Pharmaceutical and Biomedical Analysis

Animal experiments

Cerumen microbial community shifts between healthy and otitis affected dogs – Borriello et al. – PLOS ONE

Plant, root, and soil microbiome

The difference between cellulolytic ‘culturomes’ and microbiomes inhabiting two contrasting soil types – Evdokimova et al. – PLOS ONE

Diversity of bacteria populations associated with different thallus regions of the brown alga Laminaria digitata – Ihua et al. – PLOS ONE

High nitrogen concentration alter microbial community in Allium fistulosum rhizosphere – Zhao et al. – PLOS ONE

Diversity, function and assembly of mangrove root-associated microbial communities at a continuous fine-scale – Zhuang et al. – npj Biofilms and Microbiomes

Water and extremophile microbiome

Shifts in methanogenic archaea communities and methane dynamics along a subtropical estuarine land use gradient – Euler et al. – PLOS ONE

Built environment

**The microbiome of Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings: A bio-archive of their history – Piñar et al. – Frontiers in Microbiology

Microbes in the news

**Meet the microbes living on Da Vinci’s iconic sketches – Simon – Wired

Science, publishing, and career

Postdocs under pressure: ‘Can I even do this any more?’ – Woolston – Nature

November 20, 2020

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Today’s digest features a systematic assessment of best practices for the sequencing-based characterization of the human vaginal microbiome, studies on link between the plaque microbiome and peri-implantitis, cutimycin [a Cutibacterium acnes-produced antibiotic that affects niche competition among the human skin microbiota] and antibiotic resistance genes in shower drains, washing machines, and dishwashers. There is a new Micro Binfie Podcast episode about moving from the wet lab into the dry lab to become a bioinformatician. Also, check out a list of interesting (freely available) events. Happy reading/listening!

Oral microbiome

*Strong oral plaque microbiome signatures for dental implant diseases identified by strain-resolution metagenomics – Paolo Ghensi – npj Biofilms and Microbiomes

Skin microbiome

*A Cutibacterium acnes antibiotic modulates human skin microbiota composition in hair follicles – Jan Claesen – Science Translational Medicine

Review: Staphylococcus epidermidis—Skin friend or foe? – Morgan M. Brown and Alexander R. Horswill – Plos Pathogen

Gut microbiome

Preterm Infants Harbour a Rapidly Changing Mycobiota That Includes Candida Pathobionts – Stephen A. James – Journal of Fungi

Imidazole propionate is increased in diabetes and associated with dietary patterns and altered microbial ecology – Antonio Molinaro – Nature Communications

Gut microbiome stability and dynamics in healthy donors and patients with non-gastrointestinal cancers – Allyson L. Byrd – Journal of experimental medicine

Workshop report: Toward the development of a human whole stool reference material for metabolomic and metagenomic gut microbiome measurements – Rupasri Mandal – Metabolomics

Minireview: Communal Living: Glycan Utilization by the Human Gut Microbiota – Jonathon A. Briggs – Environmental Microbiology

Microbiota-directed fibre activates both targeted and secondary metabolic shifts in the distal gut – Leszek Michalak – Nature Communications

Vaginal microbiome

*Assessment of In Vitro and In Silico Protocols for Sequence-Based Characterization of the Human Vaginal Microbiome – Luisa W. Hugerth – mSphere

Shotgun sequencing of the vaginal microbiome reveals both a species and functional potential signature of preterm birth – Conor Feehily – npj Biofilms and Microbiomes

Intercepting genomic variability of Gardnerella vaginalis species through comparative genomics analyses: evolutionary and ecological implications – Chiara Tarracchini – Applied and Environmental Microbiology

Engineered phage endolysin eliminates Gardnerella in bacterial vaginosis without damaging the healthy vaginal microbiome – Christine Landlinger – medRxiv

Adaptive response to iterative passages of five Lactobacillus species in simulated vaginal fluid – Katelyn Brandt & Rodolphe Barrangou – BMC Microbiology

Dominance network analysis of the healthy human vaginal microbiome not dominated by Lactobacillus species – Wendy Li and Zhanshan Sam Ma – Computational and Structural Biotechnology Journal

Animal microbiome

The haybiome: Characterising the viable bacterial community profile of four different hays for horses following different pre-feeding regimens – Simon Daniels – Plos One

Review: Value of Probiotics in Canine and Feline Gastroenterology – Silke Salavati Schmitz – Veterinary Clinics of North America: Small Animal Practice

Massive gene presence-absence variation shapes an open pan-genome in the Mediterranean mussel – Marco Gerdol – Genome Biology

Technique

Phylotype-Level Characterization of Complex Lactobacilli Communities Using a High-Throughput, High-Resolution Phenylalanyl-tRNA Synthetase (pheS) Gene Amplicon Sequencing Approach – Shaktheeshwari Silvaraju – Applied and Environmental Microbiology

Metagenomics

Metagenomic assessment of the global distribution of bacteria and fungi – Mohammad Bahram – Environmental Microbiology

Bioinformatics

On the complexity of haplotyping a microbial community – Samuel M Nicholls – Bioinformatics

Challenges in Benchmarking Metagenomic Profilers – Zheng Sun – bioRxiv

Unifying the global coding sequence space enables the study of genes with unknown function across biomes – Chiara Vanni – bioRxiv

Nucleotide-resolution bacterial pan-genomics with reference graphs – Rachel M Colquhoun – bioRxiv

Efficient storage and analysis of quantitative genomics data with the Dense Depth Data Dump (D4) format and d4tools – Hao Hou – bioRxiv

An Integrated Workflow for Enhanced Taxonomic and Functional Coverage of the Mouse Faecal Metaproteome – Nicolas Nalpas – bioRxiv

The misuse of colour in science communication – Fabio Crameri – Nature Communications

Antimicrobial Resistance

*The Household Resistome: Frequency of β-Lactamases, Class 1 Integrons, and Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria in the Domestic Environment and Their Reduction during Automated Dishwashing and Laundering – Laura Schages – Applied and Environmental Microbiology

The unintended consequences of a surge in antibiotic resistance when removing wastewater drain biofilm – Shireen M Kotay – bioRxiv

fosM, a new family of fosfomycin resistance gene identified in bacterial species isolated from human microbiota – Sami Khabthani – Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy

Heme is crucial for medium-dependent metronidazole resistance in clinical isolates of C. difficile – Ilse M. Boekhoud – bioRxiv

Events

Black In Immuno Week – Black in Immuno – 22-28 November 2020
*A collective of scientists to celebrating, amplifying, and promoting the work of Black Immunologists across the globe.

Webinar: Antibiotic Resistance in the Environment – Organizer: Resistomap – Date: Tuesday, 24 November 2020

Webinar: Microbiology Webinars – FEMS – webinar recordings available

Virtual course and symposium: Harnessing Our Inner Ecology To Track and Treat Disease – Institute for Systems Biology – October 15 and 16, 2020
*all course materials/tutorials and talks are available for free on the website

Virtual Conference on Prokaryotic Small Proteins – Organizers: Todd Gray, Kai Papenfort, Gigi Storz and Joe Wade – January 12-14, 2021

Podcast

*Moving from wet to dry with Phil Ashton – Hosts: Andrew Page, Nabil-Fareed Alikhan and Lee Katz – Micro Binfie Podcast

Real-time quantitative proteomics with Devin Schweppe – Host: Jacob Schreiber – The Bioinformatics Chat

Interspecies collaborations with Mindaugas Gapševičius – Host: Aga Pokrywka – Ferment Radio

Microbiome as Organ: Researcher Colin Hill Talks Bacteria and Bacteriophages in Human Body with Colin Hill – Host: Richard Jacobs – The Finding Genius Podcast

What Does Your Microbiome Say About You? with Colin Hill – Host: Andrea Hardy – Let’s Gut Real

Colouring booklet

Microbes, diet and beyond by Microbiome Support EU project; Illustrations by Maria Pock

Boardgame

Drugs vs Bugs, a free and exciting Print’n’Play boardgame developed by Célia Souque

November 14, 2020

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Hello from the Sonoran Desert! In today’s digest, you’ll find great papers, in particular in soil and water microbiology but also in bioinformatics! As an example, Mara and collaborators are exploring the viruses found in the oxygen-deficient water column of the Cariaco basin. Interestingly, a large diversity of viral Auxilliary Metabolic Genes (AMGs) were found and give new insights in how phages may interact with their bacterial hosts in this understudied ecosystem.

In the bioinformatics section, I recommend anyone interested in phage metagenomics to take a look at the paper from Ren and collaborators. The authors have developed a reference-free and alignment-free deep learning tool, called DeepVirFinder, allowing the retrieval of viral sequences in metagenomes.

Today’s non-microbiology digest is a paper announcing the last update of the Genome Online Database (GOLD), a manually curated collection of genome projects and their metadata from around the world, which now contains more than a million entries! Great news for bioinformaticians!

Have a great Saturday!

Human gut microbiome

The bacterial association with oral cavity and intra-abdominal abscess after gastrectomy – Nishikawa et al. – PlosOne

Animal microbiome

Loss of symbiont infectivity following thermal stress can be a factor limiting recovery from bleaching in cnidarians – Kishimoto et al. – ISME Journal

Plant, root, and soil microbiome

A cosmopolitan fungal pathogen of dicots adopts an endophytic lifestyle on cereal crops and protects them from major fungal diseases – Tian et al. – ISME Journal

Air microbiome

Spatio-temporal variations in bacterial and fungal community associated with dust aerosol in Kuwait – Al Salameen et al. – PlosOne

Water and extremophile microbiome

Environmental heterogeneity determines the ecological processes that govern bacterial metacommunity assembly in a floodplain river system – Huber et al. – ISME Journal

A large-scale assessment of lakes reveals a pervasive signal of land use on bacterial communities – Kraemer et al. – ISME Journal

Viral elements and their potential influence on microbial processes along the permanently stratified Cariaco Basin redoxcline – Mara et al. – ISME Journal

Phages and Viruses

Metagenomic Analysis of the Enteric RNA Virome ofInfants from the Oukasie Clinic, North West Province,South Africa, Reveals Diverse Eukaryotic Viruses – Mogotsi et al. – Viruses

Bioinformatics

Identifying viruses from metagenomic data using deep learning – Ren et al. – Quantitative Biology

Review: Reconstructing organisms in silico: genome-scale models and their emerging applications – Fang et al. – Nature Reviews Microbiology

Zero-Inflated gaussian mixed models for analyzing longitudinal microbiome data – Zhang et al. – PlosOne

Evaluating the number of different genomes in a metagenome by means of the compositional spectra approach – Kirzhner et al. – PlosOne

Survey of metaproteomics software tools for functional microbiome analysis – Sajulga et al. – PlosOne

Techniques

Sample pooling methods for efficient pathogen screening: Practical implications – Furstenau et al. – PlosOne

My non-microbiology picks

Genomes OnLine Database (GOLD) v.8: overview and updates – Mukherjee et al. – Nucleic Acids Research

November 5, 2020

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Hello, friends!

I’m an American who grew up in North Carolina, lived in Georgia for many years, and now counts Pennsylvania as home. All of this is to say, I’ve been especially consumed by the US election this morning and so today’s digest is tailor made to distract me for a few hours. It contains a heavy dose of general microbiome, environmental microbiology, and microbial ecology articles. If you need a bigger distraction than usual, I’ve highlighted a few articles that I am particularly looking forward to reading and am using this space as an opportunity to reintroduce myself and share why these articles have peaked my interest.

I completed my PhD research on the cockroach gut microbiome and through this work, I realized how complex microbiome-host-environmental interactions can be. Because of this, my first highlighted article is a review about cockroach-associated microbes. Currently, I work in a national lab studying environmental-associated microbes (and their functional capacity!) in a variety of different energy-associated environments. It’s no wonder I’m excited to read the second highlighted article focused on novel soil microbes found in an abandoned coal mine! I’m also very hungry at the moment, so as soon I read the phrase “smoked cow cheese” I was motivated to explore my cheese drawer as well as think more about microbial food safety and the microbial production of favor compounds. Finally, I love musical theater and science outreach, so I’m delighted to share a mouldy article that combines both passions.

Happy reading, everyone!

General microbiome

Review: The pneumococcal social network – Aggarawal et al. – PLOS Pathogens

Expanding magnetic organelle biogenesis in the domain Bacteria – Lin et al. – Microbiome

Gene duplication drives genome expansion in a major lineage of Thaumarchaeota – Sheridan et al. – Nature Communications

Metatranscriptomic analysis reveals active microbes and genes responded to short-term Cr(VI) stress – Yu et al. – Ecotoxicology

Effects of heavy ion particle irradiation on spore germination of Bacillus spp. from extremely hot and cold environments – Zammuto et al. – Life
Human gut microbiome

Gut microbiome

Gut microbiota ecology: Biodiversity estimated from hybrid neutral-niche model increases with health status and aging – Sala et al. – PLOS ONE

Implication of gut microbiota in the physiology of rats intermittently exposed to cold and hypobaric hypoxia – Ramos-Romero et al. – PLOS ONE

Animal microbiome

Exploring the resident gut microbiota of stranded odontocetes: high similarities between two dolphin species Tursiops truncatus and Stenella coeruleoalba – Abdelrhman et al. – Journal of the Marine Biological Association of the UK

**Review: Bacteria associated with cockroaches: health risk or biotechnological opportunity? – Guzman & Vilcinskas – Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology

Water and extremophile microbiome

Impact of land uses, drought, flood, wildfire, and cascading events on water quality and microbial communities: A review and analysis – Mishra et al. – Journal of Hydrology

Dams shift microbial community assembly and imprint nitrogen transformation along the Yangtze River – Gao et al. – Water Research

Built environment

**Isolation and characterization of soil bacteria from an abandoned coal mine in southeast Kansas – Bechtold et al. – BioOne Complete

Review: Understanding building-occupant-microbiome interactions toward healthy built environments – Li et al. – Frontiers of Environmental Science & Engineering

Food microbiology

**Microbial quality of smoked cow cheese “Parencia” – Kačániová et al. – Scientific Papers: Animal Science and Biotechnologies

Phages and viruses

Virome of bat guano from nine northern California roosts – Li et al. – Journal of Virology

Bioinformatics

The IMG/M data management and analysis system v.6.0: new tools and advanced capabilities – Chen et al. – Nucleic Acids Research

PhANNs, a fast and accurate tool and web server to classify phage structural proteins – Cantu et al. – PLOS Computational Biology

Techniques

Low-cost biofuel-powered autoclaving machine for use in rural health care centres – Ahmed et al. – Journal of Medical Engineering & Technology

**‘The Mould that Changed the World’: Quantitative and qualitative evaluation of children’s knowledge and motivation for behavioural change following participation in an antimicrobial resistance musical – Hall et al. – PLOS ONE

Harnessing the power of eDNA metabarcoding for the detection of deep-sea fishes – McClenaghan et al. – PLOS ONE

November 1, 2020

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Hello from the Sonoran Desert! In today’s digest, you’ll find several interesting works, in particular on recent advances in understanding the gut microbiome! Iandaza and collaborators review the rise of machine learning and deep learning methods in exploring the gut microbiota and the potential of these methods in the diagnosis and treatment of diseases. Additionally, this digest links to a freely-accessible webinar series from the university of Illinois on gut-brain connections.

If you are interested in microbial ecology, I also recommend taking a look at a very interesting preprint from Ettinger and collaborators. The authors investigate the distribution of fungi associated with a widely distributed seagrass, Zostera marina. This work is particularly relevant since the role and diversity of fungi in marine ecosystems are often overlooked in microbiome studies, while terrestrial fungi have been shown to have critical roles as decomposers, pathogens and endophytes.

Finally, you’ll find in this digest a non-microbiology pick: an amazing preprint where authors assessed 2.75 million open access articles on their transparency (data sharing, code sharing, conflicts of interest disclosures, funding disclosures and protocol registration)!

Have a great Sunday!

Events and webinars

Webinar: Scientific Webinars on the Gut-Brain Connection Spotlight Spike in Research

Pregnancy and early life

Review: The dark matter of microbiome: the mother-infant pair virome – Comitini et al. – Minerva Pediatrica

Human vaginal microbiome

Intrauterine Growth Restriction Is Associated with Unique Features of the Reproductive Microbiome – Hu et al. – Reproductive sciences

Human gut microbiome

Review: Gut microbiota and artificial intelligence approaches: A scoping review – Iadanza et al. – Health and Technology

Review: Circadian rhythms and the gut microbiota: from the metabolic syndrome to cancer – Bishehsari et al. – Nature Reviews Endocrinology

Ecological Structuring of Temperate Bacteriophages in the Inflammatory Bowel Disease-Affected Gut – Nishiyama et al. – Microorganisms

Animal microbiome

Preprint: Genomic and microscopic evidence of stable high density and maternally inherited Wolbachia infections in Anopheles mosquitoes – Walker et al. – BioRxiV

Plant, root, and soil microbiome

Testosterone amendment alters metabolite profiles of the soil microbial community – Ding et al. – Environmental Pollution

Host population size is linked to orchid mycorrhizal fungal communities in roots and soil, which are shaped by microenvironment – Kaur et al. – Mycorrhiza

Root exudates drive soil‐microbe‐nutrient feedbacks in response to plant growth – Zhao et al. – Plant, Cell & Environment

Microbial activity and metamitron degrading microbial communities differ between soil and water-sediment systems – Wang et al. – Journal of hazardous materials

Water and extremophile microbiome

Review: Insights into ‘Symbiodiniaceae phycosphere’ in a coral holobiont – Guedes Garrido et al. – Symbiosis

Diversity and Dynamics of Seaweed Associated Microbial Communities Inhabiting the Lagoon of Venice – Juhmani et al. – Microorganisms

Preprint: Global diversity and biogeography of the Zostera marina mycobiome – Ettinger et al. – BioRxiV

Built environment

Analysis of Microbial Community Structure and Diversity in Surrounding Rock Soil of Different Waste Dump Sites in Fushun Western Opencast Mine – Jiang et al. – Chemosphere

My non-microbiology picks

Preprint: Assessment of transparency indicators across the biomedical literature: how open is open? – Serghiou et al. – BioRxiV

October 30, 2020

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COVID19
Cancer inpatients with COVID-19: A report from the Brazilian National Cancer Institute – de Melo et al. – PLOS One

Few bacterial co-infections but frequent empiric antibiotic use in the early phase of hospitalized patients with COVID-19: results from a multicentre retrospective cohort study in The Netherlands – Karami – et al. – Infectious Diseases

Infection of dogs with SARS-CoV-2 – Sit et al. – Nature

General microbiome/metabolome

Metabolomics of primary cutaneous melanoma and matched adjacent extratumoral microenvironment – Taylor et al. PLOS One

Human gut microbiome

Microbial signature in IgE-mediated food allergies – Goldberg et al. – Genome Medicine

Gut microbiota profiles of treatment-naïve adult acute myeloid leukemia patients with neutropenic fever during intensive chemotherapy – Rattanathammethee et al. – PLOS One

[Book Chapter]Understanding Polyphenols’ Health Effects Through the Gut Microbiota – Selma et al. – Dietary Polyphenols : Their Metabolism and Health Effects

[REVIEW]Gut Microbiota: Its Potential Roles in Pancreatic Cancer – Li et al. – Front. Cell. Infect. Microbiol.

Plant, root, and soil microbiome

Biological invasions alter environmental microbiomes: A meta-analysis – Malacrino et al. – PLOS One

Phages and viruses

[PREPRINT]VirION2: a short- and long-read sequencing and informatics workflow to study the genomic diversity of viruses in nature – Zablocki et al. – bioRxiv

Mycobiome
[REVIEW]T cell immunity to commensal fungi – Scheffold, Bacher & LeibundGut-Landmann – Current Opinion in Microbiology

Bioinformatics

Prometheus, an omics portal for interkingdom comparative genomic analyses – Ko et al. – PLOS One

Microbes in the news (popular press, EurekAlert, ScienceDaily, Youtube, NPR, etc)

News in Brie! Scientists discover cheese is so smelly because it helps microbes ‘talk’ to the bacteria that makes it ripe – S. Howes – Daily Mail

October 27, 2020

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Greetings from Pittsburgh, PA!

Today’s digest a contains articles focused on the oral microbiome, koala symbionts, soil microbial communities, and more. For those of you who are a bit too tired to digest cutting-edge research, I suggest using the 10 simple steps outlined in the highlighted editorial to colorize your own data visualizations. Finally, if you just need a break, I suggest bookmarking the article on the whale skin microbiome and revisiting the film Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.

Happy reading (or movie watching)!

General microbiome

Taxonomic profiling and functional characterization of the healthy human oral bacterial microbiome from the north Indian urban sub-population – Verma et al. – Archives of Microbiology

Pregnancy and early life

Maternal and cord blood vitamin D level and the infant gut microbiota in a birth cohort study – Kassem et al. – Maternal Health, Neonatology and Perinatology

Human gut microbiome

Review: A review on preventive role of ketogenic diet (KD) in CNS disorders from the gut microbiota perspective – Rawat et al. – Reviews in Neurosciences

Animal experiments

Challenges in microbiological identification of aerobic bacteria isolated from the skin of reptiles – Brockmann et al. – PLOS ONE

Isolation and sequence-based characterization of a koala symbiont: Lonepinella koalarum – Dahlhausen et al. – Peer J

Vertical transmission of zika virus in Aedes albopictus – Lai et al. – PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases

Cultured-dependent and cultured-independent study of bacteria associated with Thai commercial stingless bee Lepidotrigona terminata – Suphaphimol et al. – Journal of Apicultural Research

Animal microbiome

**Skin microbiome of beluga whales: spatial, temporal, and health-related dynamics – Van Cise et al. – Animal Microbiome

Diversity of bacterial symbionts associated with Myzus persicae (Sulzer) (Hemiptera: Aphididae: Aphidinae) revealed by 16S rRNA Illumina sequencing – Xu et al. – Microbial Ecology

Plant, root, and soil microbiome

Protists and collembolans alter microbial community composition, C dynamics and soil aggregation in simplified consumer–prey systems – Erktan et al. – Biogeosciences

Responses of soil bacteria and fungi after 36 years fertilizer, straw cover, and irrigation management practices in northwest China – Zhang et al. – Soil Use and Management

Water and extremophile microbiome

Integration of time-series meta-omics data reveals how microbial ecosystems respond to disturbance – Herold et al. – Nature Communications

Islands in the sand: Are all hypolithic microbial communities the same? – Lebre et al. – FEMS Microbiology Ecology

Shifts of sediment bacterial community and respiration along a successional gradient in a typical karst plateau lake wetland (China) – Xia et al. – Journal of Oceanology and Limnology

Salinity controls soil microbial community structure and function in coastal estuarine wetlands – Zhang et al. – Environmental Microbiology

Phages and viruses

Association of host proteins with the broad host range filamentous phage NgoΦ6 of Neisseria gonorrhoeae – Piekarowicz et al. – PLOS ONE

Bioinformatics

**Editorial: Ten simple rules to colorize biological data visualization – Hattab et al. – PLOS Computational Biology

NanoGalaxy: Nanopore long-read sequencing data analysis in Galaxy – de Koning et al. – GigaScience

Predicting antimicrobial resistance using conserved genes – Nguyen et al. – PLOS Computational Biology

Techniques

Review: Innovations to culturing the uncultured microbial majority – Lewis et al. – Nature Reviews Microbiology

Comparison of the diversity of cultured and total bacterial communities in marine sediment using culture-dependent and sequencing methods – Wang et al. – PeerJ

Science, publishing, and career

Comment: Crowdsourcing virtual summer research opportunities to support minorities in microbiology – Johnson et al. – Nature Microbiology