Feature Channels: Microbiome

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Since 2012, UdeM PhD student Catherine Girard has collected stool samples from the Inuit of Nunavut. In a new study, she documents for the first time their "gut microbiome" – with surprising results.

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Writing this week (Jan. 10, 2017) in the journal eLife, a team led by the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Caitlin Pepperell and McMaster University's Hendrik Poinar provides insight into the everyday hazards of life in the late Byzantine Empire, sometime around the early 13th century, as well as the evolution of Staphylococcus saprophyticus, a common bacterial pathogen.

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Through a new study of the coccobacillus Francisella, Los Alamos National Laboratory researchers are working to use DNA markers to discern related but relatively harmless species as they are identified and to provide a means to distinguish them from the harmful F. tularensis.

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Biochemist Gautam Dantas inspects what’s deposited on infant diapers for clues about antibiotic resistance.

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PNNL is supporting today’s announcement by the White House about efforts related to soil sustainability by sponsoring research projects through two research initiatives with funding of $20 million. The research involves a range of diverse projects looking at soil’s role in Earth’s climate, the environment, food and fuel production.

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A new clinical study underway at Roswell Park Cancer Institute is the first to test the combination of the immunotherapy pembrolizumab with two other drugs as treatment for recurrent epithelial ovarian cancer, and is also the first ovarian cancer clinical trial to incorporate analysis of patients’ microbiomes

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A new study finds that environment and genetics determine relative abundance of specific microbes in the gut. The findings represent an attempt to untangle the forces that shape the gut microbiome, which plays an important role in keeping us healthy.

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A laboratory study of four animal species and their microbiota finds that each species hosts a unique community of microbes that can significantly improve its health and fitness.

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Writing online this week (Nov. 23, 2016) in the journal Molecular Cell, a team of researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison describes new research helping tease out the mechanics of how the gut microbiome communicates with the cells of its host to switch genes on and off. The upshot of the study, another indictment of the so-called Western diet (high in saturated fats, sugar and red meat), reveals how the metabolites produced by the bacteria in the stomach chemically communicate with cells, including cells far beyond the colon, to dictate gene expression and health in its host.

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Studying how gut bacteria affect behavior in zebrafish could lead to a better understanding of how probiotics may affect the central nervous system in humans.

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Acidification of the world’s oceans could drive a cascading loss of biodiversity in some marine habitats, according to research published today in Nature Climate Change.

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An international team of computer scientists has for the first time developed a method to find antibiotics hidden in huge but still unexplored mass spectrometry datasets. They detailed their new method, called DEREPLICATOR, in the Oct. 31 issue of Nature Chemical Biology.

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University of Delaware researchers have found that rice plants can withstand attacks from arsenic in water and soil and a fungal disease called rice blast. They have discovered that a combination of beneficial soil microbes can be applied to the infected plants to boost their natural defenses.

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When microbes inside the digestive system don’t get the natural fiber that they rely on for food, they begin to munch on the natural layer of mucus that lines the gut, eroding it to the point where dangerous invading bacteria can infect the colon wall, new research in mice shows.

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Automated teller machine keypads in New York City hold microbes from human skin, household surfaces, or traces of food, a study by researchers at New York University has found. The work shows that ATMs can provide a repository to offer a picture of a city’s DNA.

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Bacteria in your intestines may play an important role in determining if you will develop blinding wet Age-related Macular Degeneration (AMD).

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Researchers at the University of Oxford have demonstrated that the diets of organisms can affect the DNA sequences of their genes.

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By sampling the molecules on cell phones, researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine and Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences were able to construct lifestyle sketches for each phone’s owner, including diet, preferred hygiene products, health status and locations visited. This proof-of-concept study could have a number of applications, including criminal profiling, airport screening, medication adherence monitoring, clinical trial participant stratification and environmental exposure studies.

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Researchers from the University of Toronto have discovered that mice infected with the common gut parasite Tritrichomonas muris are at an increased risk of developing inflammatory colitis. Their findings, which have been published online in The Journal of Experimental Medicine, expand the type of gut-resident microorganism that can affect the health of their host and suggest that related parasites may cause gastrointestinal disease in humans.

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Joslin Diabetes Center investigators are shedding light on how the success of such microbiome treatments may be affected by genetics of the individual or animal being treated.

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The microbiome and our health are intricately connected and research in the areas of the microbiome and probiotics is advancing at a rapid rate

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UT researchers have identified a set of bacterial genes that may help them find ways to lessen the severity of the disease malaria. Their findings could also aid the research of fellow scientists working in malaria-stricken regions around the world.

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Studies of the microbiome should be integral to future precision medicine initiatives, argue scientists from the University of Chicago in a new commentary published Nov. 1 in Trends in Pharmacological Sciences.

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Researchers from the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Chicago have received a three-year, $900,000 Defense Department grant to investigate how the gut microbiome – the trillions of bacteria, viruses and other bugs that make our digestive systems their home – influences breast cancer.

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Microbes have a remarkable ability to adapt to the extreme conditions in fracking wells. New finding help scientists understand what is happening inside fracking wells and could offer insight into processes such as corrosion and methane production.

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Marine symbiotic bacteria may help to "fertilize" animal growth in the oceans. Microbiologist Jillian Petersen and colleagues from the University of Vienna and the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology have discovered that chemosynthetic bacteria in marine animals can fix nitrogen as well as carbon. This is the first such symbiont known to be capable of nitrogen fixation.

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Researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine have found that the mouths of migraine sufferers harbor significantly more microbes with the ability to modify nitrates than people who do not get migraine headaches. The study is published October 18 by mSystems.

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New research, led by the University of Southampton, has found that human activities such as shipping are having a noticeable impact on marine species and their native habitats.

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As they grow, corals are bathed in a sea of marine microbes, such as bacteria, algae, and viruses. While these extremely abundant and tiny microorganisms influence coral communities in a variety of ways, a new study by researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences (BIOS) and University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) reveals that corals also have an impact on the microbes in waters surrounding them.

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Nikhil U. Nair, Ph.D., of Tufts University School of Engineering, has been honored with the 2016 National Institutes of Health Director's New Innovator Award for his work on engineering naturally-occurring, safe, gut bacteria to treat inborn errors of metabolism (IEMs), a relatively poorly-studied family of debilitating genetic disorders that affect patients from birth.

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Researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine discovered a pattern of microbes indicative of IBD in dogs. With more than 90 percent accuracy, the team used that information to predict which dogs had IBD. However, they also determined that the gut microbiomes of dogs and humans are not similar enough to use dogs as animal models for humans with this disease. The study is published October 3 in Nature Microbiology.

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Researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine have received a five-year, $3.9 million National Institutes of Health grant to investigate the role of the gut microbiome in the development of type 2 diabetes among Hispanics/Latinos, the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. population. Hispanics in the U.S. have a 66 percent higher rate of diabetes than non-Hispanic whites (11.8 percent versus 7.1 percent). Since therapies can alter the microbiome in the gut, the research could lead to strategies for preventing and treating diabetes. Einstein co-principal investigators on the grant are Robert C. Kaplan, Ph.D., and Robert D. Burk, M.D., Rob Knight, Ph.D. at University of California San Diego is also a co-principal investigator.

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University of Chicago researchers will receive about $5 million in the first two years of a seven-year initiative called Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO), which will investigate how exposure to a range of environmental factors in early development influences the health of children.

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Argonne microbiologist Jack Gilbert explore whether or not consuming probiotics benefits our health.

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Plants can better tolerate drought and other stressors with the help of natural microbes, University of Washington research has found. Specifically, plants that are given a dose of microbes stay green longer and are able to withstand drought conditions by growing more leaves and roots and using less water.

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Complimentary media registration packages are available for AMP's upcoming 2016 Annual Meeting in Charlotte, North Carolina.

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Microbes that can reproduce rapidly in times of plenty have an evolutionary stockpile of extra genes that allows them to quickly respond to changing conditions such as oil spills or outbreaks of intestinal diseases.

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Inconsistencies across studies and sampling errors remain major barriers to understanding how the lung microbiome changes with tuberculosis, according to a review published today in Clinical Microbiology Reviews.

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A new study led by the University of Minnesota shows that monkeys in captivity lose much of their native gut bacteria diversity and their gut bacteria ends up resembling those of humans. The results suggest that switching to a low-fiber, Western diet may have the power to deplete most normal primate gut microbes in favor of a less diverse set of bacteria.

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Non-toxic, edible batteries could one day power ingestible devices for diagnosing and treating disease. One team reports new progress toward that goal with their batteries made with melanin pigments, naturally found in the skin, hair and eyes.

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PNNL scientists have untangled a soil metagenome – all the genetic material recovered from a sample of soil – more fully than ever before, reconstructing portions of the genomes of 129 species of microbes. While it’s only a tiny proportion of the species in the sample, it’s a leap forward for scientists who have had only a fraction of that success to date.

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A study led by researchers at The Saban Research Institute of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA) suggests that maternal HIV infection influences the microbiome of their HIV-uninfected infants. Their findings may account for some of the immunological and survival differences seen these children.

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Five University at Buffalo research projects aim to study how the interplay of the human microbiome – the collection of microorganisms that reside in and on the human body – and the environment affect a person’s risk for certain diseases.

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Long-term treatment with broad spectrum antibiotics decreased levels of amyloid plaques, a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease, and activated inflammatory microglial cells in the brains of mice in a new study by neuroscientists from the University of Chicago.

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No one knows for sure how they got there. But the discovery that bacteria that normally live in the gut can be detected in the lungs of critically ill people and animals could mean a lot for intensive care patients.

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Fecal transplants are increasingly being used to treat certain human illnesses and there is a major upsurge in animal experiments involving fecal material.