Hello from the Sonoran Desert! In today’s digest, you’ll find quite a few exciting reads about ancient microbes!

Duchêne and collaborators review recents efforts in paleopathology leading to the genome sequencing of ancient pathogens of historical interest such as the pre-modern bubonic plague (Yersinia pestis), smallpox (Variola virus) and cholera (Vibrio cholerae). In their review, the authors explore this amazing topic that aims to broaden our understanding of the past infectious disease.

On the other hand, Eisenhofer and collaborators examine ancient microbial DNA preserved within dental calculus samples from two major cultural periods in Japan: the Jomon period circa 3000 years ago and the Edo period circa 400–150 ago. In this piece, they explore how human oral microbiomes have changed through time in ancient Japanese populations.

Finally, you’ll find in this digest a non-microbiology pick: a “10 simple rules” paper outlining best practices for annotating and submitting sequencing data! Indeed, metadata accompanying sequence datasets is critical to ensure data longevity and reusability by both human and machine agents, and poor metadata can drastically reduce the value of sequencing experiments by limiting its reuse in integrative analyses!

Have a great Sunday!

General Microbiology

Review: The Recovery, Interpretation and Use of Ancient Pathogen Genomes – Duchêne et al. – Current Biology

Multi-site human microbiome

Functional diversity of microbial ecologies estimated from ancient human coprolites and dental calculus – Jacobson et al. – Philosphical transactions of the royal society of Biological sciences.

Human respiratory and oral microbiome

Investigating the demographic history of Japan using ancient oral microbiota – Eisenhofer et al. – Philosphical transactions of the royal society of Biological sciences.

Human gut microbiome

Preprint: Distinct human gut microbial taxonomic signatures uncovered with different sample processing and microbial cell disruption methods for metaproteomic analysis – Garcia-Duran et al. – BioRxiv.

Review: Deciphering diet-gut microbiota-host interplay: Investigations of pectin. – Tan and Nie – Trends in Food Science & Technology

Plant, root, and soil microbiome

Book Chapter: Microbes and Environment: Global Warming Reverting the Frozen Zombies. In: Fahad et al. (eds) Environment, Climate, Plant and Vegetation Growth. Springer, Cham.

Taxonomic Diversity of Bacteria and Their Filterable Forms in the Soils of Eastern Antarctica (Larsemann Hills and Bunger Hills) – Kudinova et al. – Microbiology.

Preprint: Long-term warming effects on the microbiome and nitrogen fixation associated with the moss Racomitrium lanuginosum in Icelandic tundra – Klarenberg et al. – bioRxiv

Water and extremophile microbiome

Diversity of Eukaryotic Microorganisms in the Drainage Waters of a Coal Open-Cast Mine – Gruzdev et al. – Microbiology

Dissimilarity of microbial diversity of pond water, shrimp intestine and sediment in Aquamimicry system – Zeng et al. – AMB express.

Comparative diversity analysis of halophiles at two polar saltern systems in Indramayu, West Java, Indonesia – Chasanah et al. – Letters in Applied Microbiology.

Mechanistic model of nutrient uptake explains dichotomy between marine oligotrophic and copiotrophic bacteria – Norris et al. – BioRxiv.

Food microbiology

Review: Microbial diversity of seafood. Parlapani. Current Opinion in Food Science.

Phages and viruses

The first head‐tailed virus, MFTV1, produced by a hyperthermophilic methanogenic deep‐sea archaea – Thiroux et al. – Environmental microbiology.

Review: Single-virus genomics and beyond – Martinez et al. – Nature reviews Microbiology

Bioinformatics

A Rapid Automated Process for Organizing Bacterial Cluster Segments Using Deep Neural Networks – Elroy Martis et al. – IEEE conference

Techniques

FACS-iChip: a high-efficiency iChip system for microbial ‘dark matter’ mining – Liu et al. – Marine Life Science and Technology

Comparison of Nucleic Acid Extraction Methods for a Viral Metagenomics Analysis of Respiratory Viruses – Sabatier et al. – Microorganisms

Science, publishing, and career

Preprint: Advancing science or advancing careers? Researchers’ opinions on success indicators – Aubert Bonn and Pinxten – BioRxiv.

My non-microbiology picks

Ten simple rules for annotating sequencing experiments – Stevens et al. – Plos Computational Biology