Babies get their intestinal viruses in stages
A fascinating new paper by Guanxiang Liang and coworkers in Nature looks at how infants end up with a community of viruses in their guts: “The stepwise assem...
All posts tagged with microbiome
Link: Why are captive gorillas getting heart disease?
The Atlantic has a wonderful long-read story by Krista Langlois looking into the heart health of captive male gorillas in the U.S.: “Something Mysterious Is ...
Why do bamboo lemurs have such a diversity of gut microbes?
North Carolina State University has put out a news article about some recent work by Erin McKenney, who is studying the gut microbiome of lemurs: “Can You Gu...
Mushroom-munching poplar-popping Neandertals
Neandertals ate mushrooms. That’s the conclusion of new work examining the DNA remnants in ancient dental calculus. Can we believe it?
Link: Captive monkey microbiomes are more like humans
Ed Yong writes about an examination of the microbiomes of different monkey species in captivity versus wild populations: “Captivity Makes Monkey Microbiomes ...
Link: ‘Ancestral’ microbiomes
Ed Yong covers a new preprint quantifying the microbiome diversity of hunter-gatherer people in Cameroon, in comparison to local agricultural people: “Surpri...
An exotic intestinal infusion
Jeff Leach, at the “Human Food Project”, has written pungently about a bout of microbiome self-experimentation: “(Re)Becoming Human: what happened the day I ...
Taking a blender to the skin
A new paper by Alban Mathieu and colleagues looked at the functional pathways represented by the metagenomes of microbial communities living on the skin of t...
Close contact skin microbiome smashup
Roller derby scientist Kate Clancy reviews a paper about skin microbiome migration among roller derby teams during matches: “Roller Derby Teammates Give Each...
Coprolite microbial ecology
The advent of metagenomic analysis of microbial communities has led to some unexpected insights about human biology. These techniques have quietly been leadi...
Tracing teeth troubles with fossil bacteria
Ed Yong has a great account today of some research from Alan Cooper’s lab on the oral microbiome in pre-agricultural and post-agricultural Europeans: “Prehis...
Chimpanzee microbiome variation is like ours
A new paper by Andrew Moeller and colleagues surveys the variation in species composition of gut microbiomes in the chimpanzees from Gombe, Tanzania Moeller:...
Population gut metagenomics
The new research by Tanya Yatsunenko and colleagues examining gut microbiomes in different human populations is just incredibly cool work Yatsunenko:2012. I ...