Does the brain listen to the gut?

Transplanting gut bacteria from one mouse strain to another can override genetics and change behavior

Our unique microbial identity.

A recent article examines the extent of individual variation in microbial identities and how this might determine disease susceptibility, therapeutic responses and recovery from clinical interventions

Returned Solar Max hardware degradation study results

The Solar Maximum Repair Mission returned with the replaced hardware that had been in low Earth orbit for over four years. The materials of this returned hardware gave the aerospace community an opportunity to study the realtime effects of atomic oxygen, solar radiation, impact particles, charged particle radiation, and molecular contamination. The results of these studies are summarized

Understanding grapevine-microbiome interactions: implications for viticulture industry.

Until recently, the analysis of complex communities such as that of the grapevine-microbe holobiont has been limited by the fact that most microbes are not culturable under laboratory conditions (less than 1%). However, metagenomics, the study of the genetic material recovered directly from environmental samples without the need for enrichment or of culturing, has led to open an unprecedented era in the field of microbiology. Importantly, this technological advance has now become so pervasive that it is being regularly applied to explore soils and plants of agricultural interest. Interestingly, many large companies are taking notice, with significant financial investment being used to exploring ways to manipulate the productivity, disease resistance and stress tolerance for crops by influencing the microbiome. To understand which microbes one needs to manipulate to influence this valuable characteristics, we need to sequence the microbiome and capture the genetic and hence functional metabolic information contained therein. For viticulture and other agricultural fields where the crop is also associated to particular flavor properties that may also be manipulated, understanding how the bacteria, fungi and viruses influence the development and hence chemical makeup of the crop is essential

mSystems : learning to love systems

© The Author(s), 2015. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in mSystems 1 (2016): e00015-15, doi:10.1128/mSystems.00015-15

The Origin, Succession, and Predicted Metabolism of Bacterial Communities Associated with Leaf Decomposition.

Intraspecific variation in plant nutrient and defensive traits can regulate ecosystem-level processes, such as decomposition and transformation of plant carbon and nutrients. Understanding the regulatory mechanisms of ecosystem functions at local scales may facilitate predictions of the resistance and resilience of these functions to change. We evaluated how riverine bacterial community assembly and predicted gene content corresponded to decomposition rates of green leaf inputs from red alder trees into rivers of Washington State, USA. Previously, we documented accelerated decomposition rates for leaves originating from trees growing adjacent to the site of decomposition versus more distant locales, suggesting that microbes have a "home-field advantage" in decomposing local leaves. Here, we identified repeatable stages of bacterial succession, each defined by dominant taxa with predicted gene content associated with metabolic pathways relevant to the leaf characteristics and course of decomposition. "Home" leaves contained bacterial communities with distinct functional capacities to degrade aromatic compounds. Given known spatial variation of alder aromatics, this finding helps explain locally accelerated decomposition. Bacterial decomposer communities adjust to intraspecific variation in leaves at spatial scales of less than a kilometer, providing a mechanism for rapid response to changes in resources such as range shifts among plant genotypes. Such rapid responses among bacterial communities in turn may maintain high rates of carbon and nutrient cycling through aquatic ecosystems.IMPORTANCE Community ecologists have traditionally treated individuals within a species as uniform, with individual-level biodiversity rarely considered as a regulator of community and ecosystem function. In our study system, we have documented clear evidence of within-species variation causing local ecosystem adaptation to fluxes across ecosystem boundaries. In this striking pattern of a "home-field advantage," leaves from individual trees tend to decompose most rapidly when immediately adjacent to their parent tree. Here, we merge community ecology experiments with microbiome approaches to describe how bacterial communities adjust to within-species variation in leaves over spatial scales of less than a kilometer. The results show that bacterial community compositional changes facilitate rapid ecosystem responses to environmental change, effectively maintaining high rates of carbon and nutrient cycling through ecosystems