«We are seeing an explosion in our mechanistic understanding of
how microbial communities in our intestines and elsewhere influence multiple aspects of immune and metabolic health,» said John Wherry, Ph.D., Deputy Editor of the Journal of Leukocyte Biology.
Bailey was also a key researcher in the Microbial Communities Initiative, linking microbial structure and function to soil physical structure to better understand
how microbial communities function within soils.
The researchers looked at
how microbial communities (from waste - water - activated sludge) behaved when exposed to gold nanoparticles with various surface coatings and shapes.
Because they can now follow transient species formed as a result of electron transfer among communities in real time, Yu and her team are using this approach to study
how microbial communities communicate with one another.
The eventual goal is to predict
how microbial communities will react to environmental conditions such as droughts and to manage these communities to improve the yields, nutritional content or the carbon storing capacity of plants, for example.
I want to know
how microbial communities form over time and how they adapt to their environments.
The open source software package the researchers have designed, known as Microbial Dynamical Systems INference Engine (MDSINE), uses advanced machine learning technologies to accurately predict
how microbial communities in the gut will grow and interact over time.
The study suggests a new method to show
how microbial communities, including those responsible for illnesses like Legionnaires» disease, may assemble inside the plumbing systems of homes and public buildings.
Other topic areas include studying materials that form in temperatures above 2000 °C, using quantum physics to create better computers, and studying
how microbial communities may help host organisms respond to stress.
Understanding
how microbial communities in the biocrusts adapt to their harsh environments could provide important clues to help shed light on the roles of soil microbes in the global carbon cycle.
In this latest advance reported in PNAS, the Wyss team showed that the human gut - on - a-chip's unique ability to co-culture intestinal cells with living microbes from the normal gut microbiome for an extended period of time, up to two weeks, could allow breakthrough insights into
how the microbial communities that flourish inside our GI tracts contribute to human health and disease.
Mothers known as «non-secretors» have a non-functional fucosyltransferase 2 (FUT2) gene, which alters the composition of their breast milk sugars and changes
how the microbial community, or microbiota, of their infants» guts develop.
«Now we plan to see
how the microbial community evolves when you give it oil,» says Grimes.
Not exact matches
«By understanding
how microbes work and modifying the environments where they function, we can eventually engineer
microbial communities to enhance soil productivity.
But the team hopes the Lake Whillans
microbial community can help it understand so - called extremophile organisms that can exist in the extreme dark and cold, and
how such microbes might also be affecting the chemistry of the ice itself.
«The next phases are a lot more soil biology, measuring changes below ground in fungal and
microbial communities to get a handle on
how they are responding to the warming.»
«Also by studying
how the gut microbiota usually recover after cholera, we gain new ideas about
how to manage severely disturbed
microbial communities, ideas that can be used to protect against diseases that often follow such disturbance, such as infections that commonly follow antibiotic use.»
Model simulations can always be improved by testing predictions against field data collected from different ecosystems, and Sulman and Phillips are doing just that: investigating
how roots influence soil decomposition and protected forms of carbon in forests that vary in the composition of tree and
microbial communities.
Without that information, it's impossible to know, for example,
how antibiotics affect the
microbial community in the intestines, he says.
The study adds to knowledge of
how microbes colonize our skin and
how much our
microbial communities — or microbiomes — change when we contact other people or surfaces, whether it's a doorknob at home or medical equipment in a hospital.
Only further investigation will reveal
how much of it makes its way from the river transport to the deep ocean, however, and
how it might affect marine life, especially
microbial communities that live in and feed on small organic particles.
Knowing
how giant viruses impact
microbial survival and
community interactions is relevant to U.S. Department of Energy missions in bioenergy and environment.
In addition, cohousing coprophagic mice harboring transplanted microbiota from discordant pairs provides an opportunity to determine which bacterial taxa invade the gut
communities of cage mates,
how invasion correlates with host phenotypes, and
how invasion and
microbial niche are affected by human diets.
Not only did the gene sequencing show several bacteria could break down aromatic hydrocarbons, it illuminated
how various species worked together to maximize the genetic potential of the whole
microbial community.
«Since the
microbial community is a critical part of a food web, global warming will have direct impacts on organisms feeding on plankton... What exactly and
how large this impact will be will require more data to understand.»
The team also shows
how to identify bacteria most crucial for a healthy and stable
microbial community, which could inform the development of probiotics and other therapies.
They also looked at the total repertoire of genes in the sampled DNA to assess
how well the
microbial community was working.
But
how those genes interact with the
microbial community hasn't been clear.
«With the growing understanding that all animals are in fact in a symbiotic relationship with complex
microbial communities, the framework to consider
how symbiotic interactions shape host evolution should be expanded,» he said.
Finding out
how methane and other organic species are formed in deep - sea hydrothermal systems is compelling because these compounds support modern day life, providing energy for
microbial communities in the deep biosphere, and because of the potential role of abiotically - formed organic compounds in the origin of life.
Still, he adds, «there's a lot more basic biology that will need to be worked out to fully appreciate the mechanisms that cause sweeteners to alter gut
microbial community composition and function, and
how in turn this shapes host metabolism.»
«Now we need to improve predictions of
how methane - producing
microbial communities will respond to climate change.
Jansson and collaborators also want to analyze
how roots and
microbial communities interact to gain a more holistic understanding of any impacts a decrease in methane - producing bacteria may have.
We might be able to feed the world better if you knew who the members of the
microbial communities are, who the friendlies are, and
how to enhance their activities.
«Our goal is to discover what
microbial communities exist in different parts of the human body and to explore
how these
communities change in the presence of health or disease,» said National Human Genome Research Institute Director, Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D., co-chair of the Human Microbiome Project Implementation Group.
Eoin Brodie seeks to reverse engineer naturally occurring microbiomes to understand the functional roles of the microorganisms within them and
how their interactions with one another and the environment create stable
microbial communities.
Jansson had long been curious about
how these rapid temperature changes were affecting the underground
microbial community, and whether these changes had any surprising side effects.
As researchers begin to understand what constitutes a healthy microbiome, they are also learning
how imbalances in
microbial communities can cause disease — and
how to restore the balance as a means of treatment.
In the article «Ecological
communities by design,» Fredrickson discusses
how synthetic ecology — the design and construction of
microbial communities with desirable properties — requires new knowledge on
how communities function.
How to use
microbial community data from soils, dust, or objects for forensic or archaeologic use.
How are
microbial communities assembled in the > 5,000 - y - old subsurface of marine sediment, and do they undergo adaptive evolution or accumulate mutations due to impaired DNA repair under such energy - limited conditions?
New, sophisticated methods for tracking
microbial communities have helped scientists appreciate just
how important microbes are.
He has sought to understand
how modern
microbial communities become preserved as fossils.
New research will analyze the
microbial communities inside the space station to determine
how the
communities colonize, adapt and evolve.
Attending daycare was also associated with more diverse
microbial communities overall, but feeding practices remained the most important factor influencing
how the microbiome responded to the introduction of solid foods.
How to improve digestion and strengthen immunity by cultivating two types of
microbial communities.
While these levels remain unfortunately low, animal studies provide us with some clues as to
how to increase the sulforaphane yield of these bacteria — feed them more.66 In just four days of a high broccoli diet, those bacteria that thrive on cruciferous vegetables grow in number, leading to a change in composition of the
microbial community and an increase in opportunistic bacteria that turn our broccoli into cancer - fighting sulforaphane.
Another study, also published in Nature, tried to work out
how these rich and extraordinary
microbial communities would respond to warmer temperatures.
The results hold implications for land management, improved climate change models, and a better understanding of carbon cycling in soil
microbial communities and
how changes in global temperatures impact Earth's deserts.
A team of Berkeley Lab researchers has performed molecular level analysis of desert biological soil crusts — living ground cover formed by
microbial communities — to reveal
how long - dormant cyanobacteria become activated by rainfall then resume dormancy when the precipitation stops.