Feature Channels: Microbiome

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New research by University of Oregon biologists has found that the intestines help regulate the gut’s acidity, which helps keep their bacterial communities in balance. Microbiologist Karen Guillemin and neuroscientist Judith Eisen will publish their findings February 1 in the journal PLOS Pathogens. In the study, they used a common heartburn medication in zebrafish to alter gut acidity and change microbial communities. Scientists have known for years that gut bacteria are important for digestive health. And other studies have demonstrated a strong connection between the gut and the brain. The new work links those two mostly distinct areas of research together.

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Tae Seok Moon at the McKelvey School of Engineering has taken a big step forward in his quest to design a modular, genetically engineered kill switch that integrates into any genetically engineered microbe, causing it to self-destruct under certain defined conditions.

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Microbes release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere when they eat and represent a huge amount of the Earth’s biomass. As a result, they have a huge effect on carbon dioxide emissions. Predicting the size of that effect and how global warming will affect it is challenging. Researchers showed that measuring certain features of microbes allows them to reliably predict how respiration in those microbes will change as temperatures rise.

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Three scientists from the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have been elected fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, or AAAS, the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the Science family of journals.

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Researchers at UC San Diego used a multi-omics approach to investigate stool samples from patients with ulcerative colitis, a chronic inflammatory bowel disease. The team has identified the family of microbiome-derived enzymes driving the disease, and demonstrated a potential therapeutic solution.

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Researchers at University of Illinois Chicago have identified changes in the gut microbiome that can lead to gestational diabetes.

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A new study in mice from University of Maryland School of Medicine researchers showed that an unhealthy vaginal microbiome in pregnant mothers in combination with an unhealthy diet contributed to increased pup deaths and altered development in the surviving babies.

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Scientists can create synthetic communities of bacteria and other microbes to learn how they affect their plant hosts. New research presents a culture collection of 3,211 individual strains of bacteria from the root community of Populus trees. This huge new collection will help scientists study how microbes can assist plant hosts and may help improve these trees’ resistance to stresses.

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A new grant from the Chicago Department of Public Health will help assess COVID spread through testing wastewater.

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National Institutes of Health establishes Microbiome and Metagenomics Center at UC San Diego, part of new effort to predict individual responses to food and inform personalized nutrition recommendations.

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A study led by UC Davis has found significant gut bacteria profile differences between Black and white women, even after accounting for their insulin sensitivity status.

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The giant panda feeds exclusively on fibrous bamboo, yet they still manage to stay chubby and healthy.

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The 2022 SOT Award recipients represent outstanding individuals in academia, industry, and government whose work in chemical exposures and effects, genetic risk factors, radiation effects, new approach methodologies, the microbiome, and more is improving understanding of health risks.

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Recent work shows that the plant microbiome—the microorganisms in a plant and its immediate environment—influences plant health, survival, and fitness. New research on the microbiome of several types of poplar trees found that the composition of the microbiome changed dramatically over time, and the trees’ genetic makeup proved to be less of a factor than researchers had expected.

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A mélange of mini science stories from Berkeley Lab, December 2021.

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Perturbing the gut microbiome with antibiotics during early life leads to a reduction in amyloid plaques in male mice in adulthood — and microglia are a critical component of the effect.

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Researchers will study how pandemic-related stressors influence sexual behavior and risk of sexually transmitted infections among girls and young women in Kenya, where a dramatic increase in infections has been revealed in preliminary data, compared to 12-18 months prior.

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A team led by NIBIB scientists has developed hardware and software innovations to construct super-resolution, 3D confocal images of fine structures in living samples.

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Mice fed a diet high in fat, cholesterol and calories, akin to the Western diet, had higher measures of blood lipids associated with elevated levels of inflammation, a new UCLA study finds.

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The tiny cosmos of organisms living on a streamer of algae in a river could help scientists learn what turns an environment from healthy to toxic and back again. A multidisciplinary team led by NAU has won $3 million from the NSF to translate the codex contained in the microbiome of common algae into computer algorithms that can predict a wide range of microbial interactions.

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In an unusual study, researchers brought vampire bats from distant Panamanian populations together for four months in a laboratory setting and tracked how the bats’ gut microbes changed over time.

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Research in mice demonstrates how diet alters a gut microbe molecule that, in turn, prompts immune cells to downregulate inflammation.

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Close-up of E. coli bacteria. Tae Seok Moon, professor in the McKelvey School of Engineering, has designed a biosensor, using E. coli as a starting point from which to build a system that can detect individual chemicals in a person's gut.

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Customized molecular tools identify specific microbial functions that are key to healthy people and environments.

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Researchers gleaned their results by analyzing blood and biopsy samples from two groups totalling 18 people with Crohn’s disease, comparing them to a matching number of people from two healthy control groups. A mouse model of IBD was also used. Khan said his study was the first demonstration of the interaction between serotonin, autophagy and gut microbiota in intestinal inflammation. The paper was published by Science Advances today. Sabah Haq, a PhD student who works with Khan, is first author.

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Cleveland Clinic researchers have shown for the first time that diet-associated molecules in the gut are associated with aggressive prostate cancer, suggesting dietary interventions may help reduce risk. Findings from the study were published in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention.

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In a novel, broad assessment of bacterial-fungal interactions, researchers using unique bioinformatics found that fungi host a remarkable diversity of bacteria, making bacterial-fungal interactions far more common and diverse than previously known.

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Researchers at UC San Diego School of Medicine identify a strain of bacteria on healthy cats that produces antibiotics against severe skin infections. The findings may soon lead to new bacteriotherapies for humans and their pets, wherein cat bacteria is applied via topical cream or spray.

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Scientists specializing in research on sex and gender differences in diseases of the cardiovascular, renal, endocrine and immune systems will meet virtually October 19–22, 2021, for the American Physiological Society’s (APS) New Trends in Sex and Gender Medicine conference.

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Cholera is still an enormous problem. An acute diarrheal disease, there have been seven major pandemics in the last two hundred years.

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Researchers at Cedars-Sinai have found that aging produces significant changes in the microbiome of the human small intestine distinct from those caused by medications or illness burden. The findings have been published in the journal Cell Reports.

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A high-fat diet increases the incidence of colorectal cancer. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Fellow Semir Beyaz and collaborators from Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts Institute of Technology have discovered that in mice, fat disrupts the relationship between intestinal cells and the immune cells that patrol them looking for emerging tumors.

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这项发表在《基因组医学》（Genome Medicine）上的研究发现，通过关注胃肠道中数万亿的细菌、病毒和真菌，即肠道微生物组，可以预测类风湿性关节炎患者的未来预后。研究结果表明，肠道微生物与类风湿性关节炎患者的预后有关。

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O estudo, publicado na Genome Medicine, descobriu que a previsão do futuro prognóstico de artrite reumatoide de um paciente poderia ser possível ao direcionar o foco para os trilhões de bactérias, vírus e fungos que habitam o trato gastrointestinal, conhecido como microbioma intestinal.

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El estudio se publicó en Genome Medicine y descubrió que posiblemente se puede predecir el futuro de la artritis reumatoide de un paciente al dirigir la atención hacia los billones de bacterias, virus y hongos que habitan en el tracto gastrointestinal, conocidos como microbioma intestinal.