Category Archives: Microbial Ecology

September 15, 2023

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Today’s digest features the BugSigDB, AMPSphere and more. Also, you can check out my tips for online conferencing and how to do it better. See you at #MVIF next week!

Respiratory microbiome

The landscape of antibiotic resistance genes in the nasopharynx of preterm infants: Prolonged signature of hospitalization and effects by antibiotics – Achal Dhariwal – bioRxiv

Breast cancer microbiome

Integrating current analyses of the breast cancer microbiome – Sidra Sohail and Michael B. Burns – Plos One

Vaginal microbiome

Diet influences community dynamics following vaginal group B Streptococcus colonization – Christina J. Megli – bioRxiv

Gut microbiome

Gut microbes exacerbate systemic inflammation and behavior disorders in neurologic disease CADASIL – Sheng Liu – Microbiome

Water microbiome

Exploring novel alkane-degradation pathways in uncultured bacteria from the North Atlantic Ocean – Mirna Vázquez Rosas Landa – mSystems

Insect microbiome

Plastics shape the black soldier fly larvae gut microbiome and select for biodegrading functions – Francesca De Filippis – Microbiome

Animal experiment

Enhancing Recovery from Gut Microbiome Dysbiosis and Alleviating DSS-Induced Colitis in Mice with a Consortium of Rare Short-Chain Fatty Acid-Producing Bacteria – Achuthan Ambat – bioRxiv

Bioinformatics

BugSigDB captures patterns of differential abundance across a broad range of host-associated microbial signatures – Ludwig Geistlinger – Nature Biotechnology

Computational exploration of the global microbiome for antibiotic discovery – Célio Dias Santos-Júnior – bioRxiv

June 13, 2023

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Today’s microbiome digest includes quite a few host-microbe studies, including one published by my colleague and highlighted below which focuses on the hindgut microbiome of the American cockroach.

Human gut microbiome

Gut microbiota interspecies interactions shape the response of Clostridioides difficile to clinically relevant antibiotics – Hromada – and Venturelli – PLOS Biology

Construction of model animals to explore intestinal microbiome for detection of breast cancer – Ji et al. – PLOS One

Animal experiments

**Disentangling hindgut metabolism in the American cockroach through single-cell genomics and metatranscriptomics – Dukes et al. – Frontiers in Microbiology

Evaluation of microbial and vancomycin treatments in ulcerative colitis in murine models – Hasan and Yang – PLOS One

Animal microbiome

Geography, not lifestyle, explains the population structure of free-living and host-associated deep-sea hydrothermal vent snail symbionts – Hauer et al. – Microbiome

Insect phylogeny structures the bacterial communities in the microbiome of psyllids (Hemiptera: Psylloidea) in Aotearoa New Zealand – Martoni et al. – PLOS One

Water and extremophile microbiome

In the right place, at the right time: the integration of bacteria into the Plankton Ecology Group model – Park et al. – Microbiome

Phages and viruses

Beyond pathogenesis: Detecting the full spectrum of ecological interactions in the virosphere – Jurburg et al. – PLOS Biology

Phage therapy and the public: Increasing awareness essential to widespread use – McCammon et al. – PLOS One

May 16, 2023

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Happy Tuesday! Today’s microbiome digest is microbial ecology heavy, with articles focused on the gut microbiome, Antarctic endoliths’, water microbiomes, and more.

Human gut microbiome

Pathobionts in the tumour microbiota predict survival following resection for colorectal cancer – Alexander et al. – Microbiome

Gut microbiome transitions across generations in different ethnicities in an urban setting—the HELIUS study – van der Vossen et al. – Microbiome

Water and extremophile microbiome

Highly diverse and unknown viruses may enhance Antarctic endoliths’ adaptability – Ettinger et al. – Microbiome

Genomic insights into cryptic cycles of microbial hydrocarbon production and degradation in contiguous freshwater and marine microbiomes – Vigneron et al. – Microbiome

preprint: Allochthonous groundwater microorganisms affect coastal seawater microbial abundance, activity and diversity – Yanuka-Golub et al. – bioRxiv

Built environment

preprint: Microbial Diversity on Ancestral Halls with Different Visitor Flow Rates Using Amplicon Sequencing – Liu et al. – bioRxiv

Techniques

Comparing genomes recovered from time-series metagenomes using long- and short-read sequencing technologies – Orellana et al. – Microbiome

May 12, 2023

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Today’s digest features studies on human respiratory tract, mouse models, bovine milk microbiome, and more. See you at #MVIF next week!

Respiratory tract microbiome

Review: Ecology of the respiratory tract microbiome – Ana Elena Pérez-Cobas – Trends in Microbiology

Cervicovaginal microbiome

The cervical microbiota of Hispanics living in Puerto Rico is highly volatile and dominated by Lactobacillus iners regardless of HPV status – Daniela Vargas-Robles – bioRxiv

Gut microbiome

Key determinants of success in fecal microbiota transplantation: From microbiome to clinic – Serena Porcari – Cell Host & Microbes

Profiling the human intestinal environment under physiological conditions – Dari Shalon – Nature

Interaction between gut microbiota and sex hormones and their relation to sexual dimorphism in metabolic diseases – Jose Antonio Santos-Marcos – Biology of Sex Differences

Persistent delay in maturation of the developing gut microbiota in infants with cystic fibrosis – Paige Salerno – bioRxiv

Animal microbiome

Metagenomic analysis of milk microbiota in the bovine subclinical mastitis – Giulia Alessandri – bioRxiv

Animal experiments

MetaPhlAn 4 profiling of unknown species-level genome bins improves the characterization of diet-associated microbiome changes in mice – Paolo Manghi – Cell Reports

Bioinformatics

ResMiCo: Increasing the quality of metagenome-assembled genomes with deep learning – Olga Mineeva – Plos Computational Biology

Technique

Catch me if you can: capturing microbial community transformation by extracellular DNA using Hi-C sequencing – David Calderón-Franco – Antonie van Leeuwenhoek

Built environment

The microbiome of an outpatient rehabilitation clinic and predictors of contamination: A pilot study – Gabriella Brigando – PlosOne

May 5, 2023

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Today’s microbiome digest is a grab bag that includes ten simple rules for working with other people’s code, an article examining Wolbachia infections in native cockroach populations, and an article examining the role in lactic acid in shaping the human microbiome. Also highlighted is an article focused on human viruses residing within our cells and tissues, which demonstrated a unique virome in nine different human organs through targeted-enrichment viral metagenomics and virus specific qPCRs.

Happy reading!

General microbiome

The structure of prevacuolar compartments in Neurospora crassa as observed with super-resolution microscopy – Bowman – PLOS One

Phylogenetic trees of closely related bacterial species and subspecies based on frequencies of short nucleotide sequences – Nakano et al. – PLOS One

***Unmasking the tissue-resident eukaryotic DNA virome in humans – Pyöriä et al. – Nucleic Acids Research

Predicting partner fitness based on spatial structuring in a light-driven microbial community – Sakkos et al. – PLOS Computational Biology

Multi-site human microbiome

Evaluation of alcohol-free mouthwash for studies of the oral microbiome – Yano et al. – PLOS One

A systematically biosynthetic investigation of lactic acid bacteria reveals diverse antagonistic bacteriocins that potentially shape the human microbiome – Zhang et al. – Microbiome

Human gut microbiome

Positive mood-related gut microbiota in a long-term closed environment: a multiomics study based on the “Lunar Palace 365” experiment – Hao et al. – Microbiome

Animal microbiome

Wolbachia infection in native populations of Blattella germanica and Periplaneta americana – Choubdar et al. – PLOS One

Plant, root, and soil microbiome

Bacterial and fungal community composition and community-level physiological profiles in forest soils – Kunito et al. – PLOS One

Water and extremophile microbiome

Predicting microbial community compositions in wastewater treatment plants using artificial neural networks – Liu et al. – Microbiome

Open ocean and coastal strains of the N2-fixing cyanobacterium UCYN-A have distinct transcriptomes – Muñoz-Marín et al. – PLOS One

Meta-organism gene expression reveals that the impact of nitrate enrichment on coral larvae is mediated by their associated Symbiodiniaceae and prokaryotic assemblages – Tong et al. – Microbiome

Bioinformatics

Ten simple rules for working with other people’s code – Pilgrim et al. – PLOS Computational Biology

Predicting microbe organisms using data of living micro forms of life and hybrid microbes classifier – Raza et al. – PLOS One

iPHoP: An integrated machine learning framework to maximize host prediction for metagenome-derived viruses of archaea and bacteria – Roux et al. – PLOS Biology

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