Category Archives: Microbial Ecology

April 14, 2023

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Today’s reading recommendation includes microbiome from sites with low anthropogenic impact, drinking water microbiome, and more.

If you have only a minute for reading then your must read is this amazing summary thread on how you should be careful with making assumptions ⬇️

See you at #MVIF next week!

Global resistome

Global trends in antimicrobial resistance on organic and conventional farms – Eldon Ager – bioRxiv

*Microbiome diversity: A barrier to the environmental spread of antimicrobial resistance? – Uli Klümper – bioRxiv

Mother-to-infant microbiome

Mother-to-infant microbiota transmission and infant microbiota development across multiple body sites – Debby Bogaert – Cell Host & Microbe

Human gut microbiome

The Local Tumor Microbiome Is Associated with Survival in Late-Stage Colorectal Cancer Patients – Justine W. Debelius – Microbiology Spectrum

Exploring Bifidobacterium species community and functional variations with human gut microbiome structure and health beyond infancy – Ruben Ladeira, Julien Tap, Muriel Derrien – Microbiome Research Reports

Water microbiome

The microbial dark matter and “wanted list” in worldwide wastewater treatment plants – Yulin Zhang – Microbiome

*Microbiome, resistome and mobilome of chlorine-free drinking water treatment systems – David Calderón-Franco – Water Research

Animal experiment

Probiotics of Lacticaseibacillus paracasei SD1 and Lacticaseibacillus rhamnosus SD11 attenuate inflammation and β-cell death in streptozotocin-induced type 1 diabetic mice – Jongdee Nopparat – PlosOne

Antibiotic treatment using amoxicillin-clavulanic acid impairs gut mycobiota development through modification of the bacterial ecosystem – Madeleine Spatz – Microbiome

*Experimental Factors Influence Diversity Metrics of the Gut Microbiome in Laboratory Mice – Rikeish R. Muralitharan – bioRxiv

Virome & phages

Expanding known viral diversity in the healthy infant gut – Shiraz A. Shah – Nature Microbiology

Large-scale phage cultivation for commensal human gut bacteria – Juntao Shen – Cell Host & Microbe

Methodology

Reducing bias in microbiome research: Comparing methods from sample collection to sequencing – Jolanda Kool – Frontiers in Microbiology

In Vitro Modelling of Oral Microbial Invasion in the Human Colon – Lucie Etienne-Mesmin – Microbiology Spectrum

Bioinformatics

Improved eukaryotic detection compatible with large-scale automated analysis of metagenomes – Wojtek Bazant – Microbiome

February 25th, 2023

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Bonjour from Paris, France !

In today’s digest you will find a broad range of amazing preprints and published papers! Fontana and collaborator performed a fascinating meta-analysis of publicly datasets obtained from fecal samples of healthy athletes and healthy sedentary adults and revealed the microbiota changes associated with competitive athletes lifestyle.

Today’s non-microbiology pick is an preprint exploring postdoctoral and PhD student’s career self-efficacy in US biological sciences and showed how women and non US citizen have a significant lower level of career self-efficacy compared to their male and US citizen peers. The authors discuss potential causes for these differences and offer recommendations for increasing trainee career self-efficacy.

Have a great Saturday!

Pregnancy and early life

Preprint: Co-localization of antibiotic resistance genes is widespread in the infant gut microbiome and associates with an immature gut microbial composition – Li et al. – BioRXiv

Human gut microbiome

The human gut microbiome of athletes: metagenomic and metabolic insights – Fontana et al. – Microbiome

Review: Gut microbiome-based strategies for host health and disease – Wang et al. – Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition

The role of diet in shaping human gut microbiota – Rinninella et al. – Best practive & Research clinical Gastroenterology

Preprint: Community composition and the environment modulate the population dynamics of type VI secretion in human gut bacteria – Robitaille et al. – BioRXiv

Genetic-Phenotype Analysis of Bifidobacterium bifidum and Its Glycoside Hydrolase Gene Distribution at Different Age Groups – Wei et al. – Foods

Animal microbiome

Preprint: Life stage and vaccination shape the gut microbiome of hatchery-reared Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) – Andres et al. – BioRXiv

Plant, root, and soil microbiome

Preprint: Short- and long-term effects of continuous compost amendment on soil microbiome community – Kraut-Cohen et al. – BioRXiv

Awaking the Dormant Virome in the Rhizosphere – Braga and Schumacher – Molecular ecology

Water and extremophile microbiome

Preprint: A novel order-level lineage of ammonia-oxidizing Thaumarchaeota is widespread in marine and terrestrial environments – Zheng et al. – BioRXiv

Diverse Marine T4-like Cyanophage Communities Are Primarily Comprised of Low-Abundance Species Including Species with Distinct Seasonal, Persistent, Occasional, or Sporadic Dynamics – Dart et al. – Viruses

Food microbiology

Analysis of the core bacterial community associated with consumer-ready Eastern oysters (Crassostrea virginica) – Hines et al. – Plos One

Phages and viruses

Review: The Role of Temperate Phages in Bacterial Pathogenicity – Gummalla et al. – Microorganisms

Bioinformatics

Review: Bioinformatic Tools for NGS-Based Metagenomics to Improve the Clinical Diagnosis of Emerging, Re-Emerging and New Viruses – Ibanez-Lligona et al – Viruses

Non microbiology pick

Preprint: Citizenship status and career self-efficacy: An intersectional study of biomedical trainees in the United States – Chatterjee et al. – BioRXiv

February 18th, 2023

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Bonjour from Paris, France !

In today’s digest you will find a broad range of amazing preprints and published papers! An amazing read is a fresh preprint from Fritz and collaborator describing an exciting method of sampling in difficult to reach environments. The authors used army ants of the genus Dorylus which are foragers to survey the viral diversity of plants, vertebrate and invertebrates of the tropical forest!

Today’s non-microbiology pick is an opinion piece on the current state and limitation of viral taxonomy. In this piece, Simmonds and collaborators, provide concrete recommendations to guide the development of a coherent and comprehensive virus taxonomy.

Have a great Saturday!

Pregnancy and early life

The investigation of the association of pregnancy weight gain on maternal and neonatal gut microbiota composition and abundance using 16sRNA sequencing – Song and Liu – BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth

Human gut microbiome

The diet rapidly and differentially affects the gut microbiota and host lipid mediators in a healthy population – Bourdeau-Julien et al. – Microbiome

Review: Conversations in the Gut: The Role of Quorum Sensing in Normobiosis – Markus et al. – International Journal of Molecular Sciences

Review: Gut Microbiome and Neurodevelopmental Disorders: A Link Yet to Be Disclosed – Illiodromiti et al. – Microorganisms

Natural Green Spaces, Sensitization to Allergens, and the Role of Gut Microbiota during Infancy – Buchholz et al. – mSystems

Animal experiments

Mimicking seasonal changes in light-dark cycle and ambient temperature modulates gut microbiome in mice under the same dietary regimen – Matsumoto et al – Plos One

Animal microbiome

Preprint: Taurine as a key intermediate for host-symbiont interaction in the tropical sponge Ianthella basta – Moeller et al. – BioRxiV

Plant, root, and soil microbiome

Preprint: Transmission of synthetic seed bacterial communities to radish seedlings: impact on microbiota assembly and plant phenotype – Simonin et al. – BioRxiV

Preprint: Viral but not bacterial community succession is characterized by extreme turnover shortly after rewetting dry soils – Santos-Medellin et al. – BioRxiV

Ecological drivers and potential functions of viral communities in flooded arsenic-contaminated paddy soils – Gao et al. – Science of the total environment

Water and extremophile microbiome

Preprint: Redefinition of archetypal phytoplankton-associated bacteria taxa based on globally distributed dinoflagellates and diatoms – Yang et al. – BioRxiV

Preprint: Plastic Leachate Exposure Drives Antibiotic Resistance and Virulence in Marine Bacterial Communities – Vlaanderen et al. – BioRxiV

Phages and viruses

Preprint: African army ants at the forefront of virome surveillance in a remote tropical forest – Fritz et al. – BioRxiV

Techniques

Preprint: Dancing the Nanopore limbo – Nanopore metagenomics from small DNA quantities for bacterial genome reconstruction – Simon et al. – BioRxiV

Preprint: The long and short of it: Benchmarking viromics using Illumina, Nanopore and PacBio sequencing technologies – Cook et al. – BioRxiV

Non microbiology pick

Opinion: Four principles to establish a universal virus taxonomy – Simmonds et al. – PLoS Biology

February 13, 2023

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Today’s reading recommendation is a microbiota review collection edited by Lindsay Hall and Melanie Schirmer.

Happy Monday and see you at #MVIF!

Vaginal microbiome

Gardnerella Diversity and Ecology in Pregnancy and Preterm Birth – Hanna L. Berman – bioRxiv

Heterogeneity of the group B streptococcal type VII secretion system and influence on colonization of the female genital tract – Brady L. Spencer – bioRxiv

Urinary microbiome

Comparative Genomic Study of Streptococcus anginosus Reveals Distinct Group of Urinary Strains – Ananya Prasad – mSphere

Human gut

Gut microbes predominantly act as symbiotic partners rather than raw nutrients – Nuno Felipe da Silva Soares – bioRxiv

Antibiotic resistance in the commensal human gut microbiota – Lisa E Lamberte, Willem van Schaik – Current Opinion in Microbiology

Identifying glycan consumers in human gut microbiota samples using metabolic labeling coupled with fluorescence-activated cell sorting – Lharbi Dridi – Nature Communications

Animal experiments

Over supplementation with vitamin B12 alters microbe-host interactions in the gut leading to accelerated Citrobacter rodentium colonization and pathogenesis in mice – Andrew J. Forgie – Microbiome

Disturbance of lipid metabolism in germ-free mice transplanted with gut microbiota of DSS-induced colitis mice – Chungho Lee – Plos One

Bioinformatics

Accurate and fast graph-based pangenome annotation and clustering with ggCaller – Samuel T. Horsfield – bioRxiv

Brief report: uBin – a manual refining tool for genomes from metagenomes – Till L V Bornemann – Environmental Microbiology

In-situ metagenomics: A platform for rapid sequencing and analysis of metagenomes in less than one day – Javier Tamames – bioRxiv

The virtual microbiome: A computational framework to evaluate microbiome analyses – Belén Serrano-Antón – Plos One

February 4th, 2023

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Bonjour from Paris, France !

In today’s digest you will find a wide variety of interesting preprints and published research papers encompassing very interesting microbiome such as Yak calves rumen, compost, wineyard soil and lichen symbionth microbiota!

If you are interested in virome, I recommend looking at the fascinating preprint from Ha and collaborators investigating the biogeography of giant viruses from the phylum Nucleocytoviricota. They leveraged the bioGEOTRACES metagenomic dataset collected across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans to recovered novel genomes from these viruses and identified geographical patterns of distribution.

If you are working on human microbiomes, I recommend checking out a really interesting preprint, comparing the biases and strengths of four commercially available DNA extraction kits frequently used for whole genome shotgun analysis of the human microbiome.

Have a great Saturday!

Events and jobs

Event: Cell Symposia: Infection biology in the age of the microbiome. Paris, France June 7-9

Event: 55th Annual Meeting of the European Society for Paediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition. Vienna, Austria 17-20 May

Pregnancy and early life

Insufficient Evidence of a Breastmilk Microbiota at Six-Weeks Postpartum: A Pilot Study – Leech et al. – Nutrients

Effects of Perinatal Antibiotic Exposure and Neonatal Gut Microbiota – Morreale et al. – Antibiotics

Necrotizing Enterocolitis: The Role of Hypoxia, Gut Microbiome, and Microbial Metabolites – Kaplina et al. – International Journal of Molecular sciences

Human gut microbiome

Preprint: Functional assignment of gut-specific archaeal proteins in the human gut microbiome – Novikova et al. – BioRxiv

Animal microbiome

Combining vertebrate mitochondrial 12S rRNA gene sequencing and shotgun metagenomic sequencing to investigate the diet of the leopard cat (Prionailurus bengalensis) in Korea – Woo et al. – PLOS ONE

The association between gingivitis and oral spirochetes in young cats and dogs – Yamaki et al. – PLOS ONE

Maternal rumen and milk microbiota shapes the establishment of early-life rumen microbiota in grazing yak calves – Guo et al. – Journal of Dairy Science

Plant, root, and soil microbiome

Preprint: Fundamentals of biofilm formation in soil: From functionalized self-assembled monolayers to rewilding – Hendiani et al. – BioRxiv

Local conditions matter: Minimal and variable effects of soil disturbance on microbial communities and functions in European vineyards – Steiner et al. – PLOS ONE

Preprint: Evidence for a core set of microbial lichen symbionts from a global survey of metagenomes – Tagirdzhanova et al. – BioRxiv

Water and extremophile microbiome

Preprint: Assessing the biogeography of marine giant viruses in four oceanic transects – Ha et al. – BioRxiv

Preprint: Cross-domain interactions induce community stability to benthic biofilms in proglacial streams – Busi et al. – BioRxiv

Opinion: Viral infection in the ocean—A journey across scales – Vincent and Vardi – PLOS biology

Bioinformatics

Preprint: Identifying and tracking mobile elements in evolving compost communities yields insights into the nanobiome – Van Dijk et al – BioRxiv

Techniques

Preprint: Comparison of commercial DNA extraction kits for whole metagenome sequencing of human oral, vaginal, and rectal microbiome samples – Wright et al – BioRxiv

January 13, 2023

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The very first 2023 digest features HMOs, antimicrobials and the neonatal gut microbiota, cheese community, cow rumen microbiome, SemiBin2, and more. Happy Friday and see you next week at #MVIF!

Food microbiome

*Longitudinal, Multi-Platform Metagenomics Yields a High-Quality Genomic Catalog and Guides an In Vitro Model for Cheese Communities – Christina C. Saak – mSystems

Gut microbiome

*Human milk oligosaccharides, antimicrobial drugs, and the gut microbiota of term neonates: observations from the KOALA birth cohort study – D.J.M Barnett – Gut microbes

The gut microbiota in multiple sclerosis varies with disease activity – Florence Thirion – Genome Medicine

Review: Intestinal gas production by the gut microbiota: A review – Erasme Mutuyemungu – Journal of Functional Foods

Gestational diabetes is driven by microbiota-induced inflammation months before diagnosis – Yishay Pinto – Gut

Review: The gut microbiota is an emerging target for improving brain health during ageing – Marcus Boehme – Gut microbiome

Vaginal microbiome

Commensal Lactobacilli Metabolically Contribute to Cervical Epithelial Homeostasis in a Species-Specific Manner – Nicole R. Jimenez – mSphere

Preterm birth is associated with xenobiotics and predicted by the vaginal metabolome – William F. Kindschuh – Nature Microbiology

Animal experiment

Gut microbiota of the young ameliorates physical fitness of the aged in mice – Kwang H. Kim – Microbiome

Catheterization of mice triggers resurgent urinary tract infection seeded by a bladder reservoir of Acinetobacter baumannii – Jennie E. Hazen – Science Translational Medicine

Prebiotic intervention with HAMSAB in untreated essential hypertensive patients assessed in a phase II randomized trial – Hamdi A. Jama – Nature Cardiovascular Research

Akkermansia muciniphila protects mice against an emerging tick-borne viral pathogen – Jinyan Xie – Nature Microbiology

Animal microbiome

Beehives possess their own distinct microbiomes – Lorenzo A. Santorelli – Environmental Microbiome

*Differential carbon utilization enables co-existence of recently speciated Campylobacteraceae in the cow rumen epithelial microbiome – Cameron R. Strachan – Nature Microbiology

Bioinformatics

Ecological landscapes guide the assembly of optimal microbial communities – Ashish B. George and Kirill S. Korolev – Plos Computational Biology

Over-optimism in unsupervised microbiome analysis: Insights from network learning and clustering – Theresa Ullmann – Plos Computational Biology

Ten simple rules for using public biological data for your research – Vishal H. Oza – Plos Computational Biology

*SemiBin2: self-supervised contrastive learning leads to better MAGs for short- and long-read sequencing – Shaojun Pan – bioRxiv

December 12, 2022

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Today’s digest has the kind of articles I like best–they are all focused on the unique relationship between microbial communities and their niche environments. These environments span everything from rice seeds to the Mariana Trench to the gut microbiome and even Appalachian coalbeds. Happy reading!


Human gut microbiome

Gut microbiome of helminth-infected indigenous Malaysians is context dependent – Tee et al. – Microbiome

Animal experiments

Taurine metabolism is modulated in Vibrio-infected Penaeus vannamei to shape shrimp antibacterial response and survival – Wang et al. – Microbiome


Plant, root, and soil microbiome

Multi-genome metabolic modeling predicts functional inter-dependencies in the Arabidopsis root microbiome – Mataigne et al. – Microbiome

Dynamics of rice microbiomes reveal core vertically transmitted seed endophytes – Zhang et al. – Microbiome


Water and extremophile microbiome

Comparison of prokaryotes between Mount Everest and the Mariana Trench – Liu et al. – Microbiome


Built environment

Predominance of Methanomicrobiales and diverse hydrocarbon-degrading taxa in the Appalachian coalbed biosphere revealed through metagenomics and genome-resolved metabolisms – Ross et al. – Environmental Microbiology

Evaluation of the Microbial Community and Geochemistry in Produced Waters Collected from CO2 EOR in the Niagaran Pinnacle Reef – Stemple et al. – ACS Earth Space Chem

December 9, 2022

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Today’s digest features global antimicrobial resistance, comammox and anammox bacteria in wastewater treatment, mOTUs3, and more. Check out Elisa Granato & Christoph Ziegenhain’s story about postdoc life. Happy Friday and see you next week at #MVIF!

Global microbiome & resistome

Experimental temperatures shape host microbiome diversity and composition – Jingdi Li – Global Change Biology

Global biogeography and projection of soil antibiotic resistance genes – Zheng et al. – Science Advances

*Genomic analysis of sewage from 101 countries reveals global landscape of antimicrobial resistance – Patrick Munk – Nature Communications

Blood microbiome

No evidence for a common blood microbiome based on a population study of 9,770 healthy humans – Cedric C.S. Tan – bioRxiv

Gut microbiome

Effects of dog ownership on the gut microbiota of elderly owners – Chaona Jiang – Plos One

Prokaryotic and viral genomes recovered from 787 Japanese gut metagenomes revealed microbial features linked to diets, populations, and diseases – Yoshihiko Tomofuji – Cell Genomics

Gut microbiome-wide association study of depressive symptoms – Djawad Radjabzadeh – Nature Communications

Development of non-alcoholic steatohepatitis is associated with gut microbiota but not oxysterol synthesis – Jacqueline Wyss – bioRxiv

The microbiome’s fiber degradation profile and its relationship with the host diet – Yotam Cohen & Elhanan Borenstein – BMC Biology

Animal microbiome

Lactobacillus reuteri improves the development and maturation of fecal microbiota in piglets through mother-to-infant microbe and metabolite vertical transmission – Gang Wang – Microbiome

Live biotherapeutics

Development of a live biotherapeutic throat spray with lactobacilli targeting respiratory viral infections – Irina Spacova – Microbial Biotechnology

Soil/root/plant microbiome

Differential microbial assembly processes and co-occurrence networks in the soil-root continuum along an environmental gradient – Yangquanwei Zhong – iMeta

Water microbiome

*Co-occurrence and cooperation between comammox and anammox bacteria in a full-scale attached growth municipal wastewater treatment process – Katherine J Vilardi – bioRxiv

Full-scale activated sludge transplantation reveals a highly resilient community structure – Giulia Dottorini – Water Research

Bioinformatics

Towards complete representation of bacterial contents in metagenomic samples – Xiaowen Feng, Heng Li – arXiv

*Cultivation-independent genomes greatly expand taxonomic-profiling capabilities of mOTUs across various environments – Hans-Joachim Ruscheweyh – Microbiome

Database Resources of the National Genomics Data Center, China National Center for Bioinformation in 2023 – CNCB-NGDC Members and Partners – Nucleic Acids Research

Nanopore long-read-only metagenomics enables complete and high-quality genome reconstruction from mock and complex metagenomes – Lei Liu – Microbiome

November 8, 2022

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Greetings from Pittsburgh, PA!

It’s election day here, which means I have low grade nausea and am looking for a distraction. If you’re in the same boat, check out today’s awesome articles on a holobiont deep sea shrimp, plant-microbiome assemblies of poplar trees, and viral community-wide auxiliary metabolic genes. I also included a few interesting preprints, my favorite of which is noted below and uses a microbiome public dataset to compare different normalization and transformation methods.

Animal microbiome

A novel and dual digestive symbiosis scales up the nutrition and immune system of the holobiont Rimicaris exoculata – Aubé et al. – Microbiome

Plant, root, and soil microbiome

Plant sex affects plant-microbiome assemblies of dioecious Populus cathayana trees under different soil nitrogen conditions – Guo et al. – Microbiome

Phages and viruses

Viral community-wide auxiliary metabolic genes differ by lifestyles, habitats, and hosts – Luo et al. – Microbiome

Techniques

*Preprint: Alpha and beta-diversities performance comparison between different normalization methods and centered log-ratio transformation in a microbiome public dataset – Bars-Cortina – bioRxiv

Preprint: Noise reduction strategies in metagenomic chromosome confirmation capture to link antibiotic resistance genes to microbial hosts – McCallum et al. – bioRxiv

Preprint: Targeted metagenomics using probe capture detects a larger diversity of nitrogen and methane cycling genes in complex microbial communities than traditional metagenomics – Siljanen et al. – bioRxiv

November 02, 2022

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General microbiome

[RETRACTION]Metagenomic analysis exploring taxonomic and functional diversity of bacterial communities of a Himalayan urban fresh water lake – Ahmad et al. – PLOS One

Pregnancy and early life

A distinct clade of Bifidobacterium longum in the gut of Bangladeshi children thrives during weaning – Vatanen et al. – Clee

Multi-site human microbiome

[REVIEW]Recent advances in systemic lupus erythematosus and microbiota: from bench to bedside – Zhan et al. –

Human vaginal microbiome

Identification of shared bacterial strains in the vaginal microbiota of related and unrelated reproductive-age mothers and daughters using genome-resolved metagenomics – France et al. – PLOS One

Human gut microbiome

Gut microbiome dysbiosis in antibiotic-treated COVID-19 patients is associated with microbial translocation and bacteremia – Bernard-Raichon et al. – Nature Communications

Gut microbiota and myocardial fibrosis – Xu, Yang & Bao – European Journal of Pharmacology

Assessing the relationship between physical activity and the gut microbiome in a large, population-based sample of Wisconsin adults – Holzhausen et al. – PLOS One

Challenges and costs of donor screening for fecal microbiota transplantations – Bernard et al. – PLOS One

Animal microbiome

Gut colonization by Proteobacteria alters host metabolism and modulates cocaine neurobehavioral responses – Cuesta et al. – Cell Host & Microbe

Enriching captivity conditions with natural elements does not prevent the loss of wild-like gut microbiota but shapes its compositional variation in two small mammals – Koziol et al. – Microbiology Open

Understanding the Dynamic of POMS Infection and the Role of Microbiota Composition in the Survival of Pacific Oysters, Crassostrea gigas – Delisle et al. – Microbiology Spectrum

Changes in Gut Microbiota Structure: A Potential Pathway for Silver Nanoparticles to Affect the Host Metabolism – Wang et al. – ACS Nano

Skin microbiota of oxazolone-induced contact hypersensitivity mouse model – Mäenpää et al. – PLOS One

Effects of a farm-specific fecal microbial transplant (FMT) product on clinical outcomes and fecal microbiome composition in preweaned dairy calves – Slanzon et al. – PLOS One

Multiomics Characterization of the Canada Goose Fecal Microbiome Reveals Selective Efficacy of Simulated Metagenomes – Gil & Hird – Microbiology Spectrum

Uropygial gland microbiota differ between free-living and captive songbirds – Grieves et al. – Scientific Reports

Plant, root, and soil microbiome

Crop management shapes the diversity and activity of DNA and RNA viruses in the rhizosphere – Muscatt et al. – Microbiome

Bioinformatics

CRAMdb: a comprehensive database for composition and roles of microbiome in animals – Lei et al. – NAR

Techniques

DNA extraction bias is more pronounced for microbial eukaryotes than for prokaryotes – Brauer & Bengtsson – Microbiology Open

synDNA—a Synthetic DNA Spike-in Method for Absolute Quantification of Shotgun Metagenomic Sequencing – Zaramela et al. – mSystems