Microbial communities articles within Nature

Featured

  • News & Views |

    Bacterial residents of the human body often provide beneficial effects, but some can be harmful. The action of gut bacteria has been found to be tightly linked to neurodegeneration in a mouse model of Parkinson's disease.

    • Daniel Erny
    •  & Marco Prinz

  • Outlook |

    Once anathema, it now seems that a 'dirty' environment can enrich a baby's microbiome and lessen her or his likelihood of developing everything from obesity to asthma. Again, it seems that we can rely on man's best friend to help us out.

    • Sujata Gupta

  • Article |

    The identification of an intestinal microbiome signature that persists after successful dieting in obese mice and contributes to faster weight regain upon re-exposure to an obesity-promoting diet, and that transmits the altered weight regain phenotype to non-dieting mice.

    • Christoph A. Thaiss
    • , Shlomik Itav
    •  & Eran Elinav

  • Books & Arts |

    Adrian Woolfson examines four books on the microbiological universe that churns within us.

    • Adrian Woolfson

  • News |

    Bacteria from the human body produce an antibiotic that seems to kill resistant bacteria.

    • Anna Nowogrodzki

  • News & Views |

    Interactions in the gut between host cells and bacteria can determine a state of health or disease. A study investigates how antibiotic treatment can affect host cells in a way that drives growth of pathogenic bacteria. See Letter p.697

    • Thibault G. Sana
    •  & Denise M. Monack

  • News & Views |

    Are the dynamics of our microbial communities unique to us or does everyone's microbiota follow the same rules? The emerging insights into this question could be of relevance to health and disease. See Letter p.259

    • Karoline Faust
    •  & Jeroen Raes

  • Letter |

    A new computational method to characterize the dynamics of human-associated microbial communities is applied to data from two large-scale metagenomic studies, and suggests that gut and mouth microbiomes of healthy individuals are subjected to universal (that is, host-independent) dynamics, whereas skin microbiomes are shaped by the host environment; the method paves the way to designing general microbiome-based therapies.

    • Amir Bashan
    • , Travis E. Gibson
    •  & Yang-Yu Liu

  • Outlook |

    Many people with irritable bowel syndrome feel that they benefit from dietary interventions, but researchers still lack a full understanding of how food can inflame this disorder.

    • Sarah DeWeerdt

  • Outlook |

    The involvement of intestinal bacteria in gut-brain communication could help to explain the mysteries of irritable bowel syndrome, but the search continues for definitive evidence.

    • Michael Eisenstein

  • Article |

    An analysis of bacterial community structure and antibiotic resistance gene content of interconnected human faecal and environmental samples from two low-income communities in Latin America was carried out using a combination of functional metagenomics, 16S sequencing and shotgun sequencing; resistomes across habitats are generally structured along ecological gradients, but key resistance genes can cross these boundaries, and the authors assessed the usefulness of excreta management protocols in the prevention of resistance gene dissemination.

    • Erica C. Pehrsson
    • , Pablo Tsukayama
    •  & Gautam Dantas

  • News & Views |

    The microorganisms that colonize pregnant mice have been shown to prime the innate immune system in newborn offspring, preparing them for life in association with microbes.

    • Mihir Pendse
    •  & Lora V. Hooper

  • Letter |

    Little is known about cooperative behaviour among the gut microbiota; here, limited cooperation is demonstrated for Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron, but Bacteroides ovatus is found to extracellularly digest a polysaccharide not for its own use, but to cooperatively feed other species such as Bacteroides vulgatus from which it receives return benefits.

    • Seth Rakoff-Nahoum
    • , Kevin R. Foster
    •  & Laurie E. Comstock

  • News & Views |

    Three studies investigate the bacteria in the guts of malnourished children and find that, when this microbiota is transferred into mice, supplements of certain microbes or sugars from human breast milk can restore normal growth.

    • Derrick M. Chu
    •  & Kjersti M. Aagaard

  • News & Views |

    A chronic lack of dietary fibre has been found to reduce the diversity of bacteria in the guts of mice. This effect is not fully reversed when fibre is reintroduced, and increases in severity over multiple generations. See Letter p.212

    • Eric C. Martens

  • Letter |

    In mice on a low microbiota-accessible carbohydrate (MAC) diet, the diversity of the gut microbiota is depleted, and the effect is transferred and compounded over generations; this phenotype is only reversed after supplementation of the missing taxa via faecal microbiota transplantation, suggesting dietary intervention alone may by insufficient at managing diseases characterized by a dysbiotic microbiota.

    • Erica D. Sonnenburg
    • , Samuel A. Smits
    •  & Justin L. Sonnenburg

  • News & Views |

    Machine learning, applied to complex multidimensional data, is shown to provide personalized dietary recommendations to control blood glucose levels. This is a step towards integrating the gut microbiome into personalized medicine.

    • Erica D. Sonnenburg
    •  & Justin L. Sonnenburg

  • Outlook |

    Tim Lu's synthetic-biology research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge combines biological engineering with electronics and computer science to create bacteria that make structural proteins containing tiny semi-conductors called quantum dots. He explains how genome-editing techniques are furthering his research and their role in treating disease.

    • Will Tauxe

  • News & Views |

    Large-scale cultivation and genome sequencing of the bacteria that inhabit the leaves and roots of Arabidopsis plants have paved the way for probing how microbial communities assemble and function. See Article p.364

    • Gwyn A. Beattie

  • Article |

    The microbiota of the rhizosphere (roots) and phyllosphere (leaves) of healthy plants consist of taxonomically structured bacterial communities; here the majority of species representing the main bacterial phyla from these two organs were isolated and genomes of about 400 representative bacteria were sequenced; the resources of cultured bacteria, corresponding genomes and a gnotobiotic plant system enabled an examination of the taxonomic overlap and functional specialization between the rhizosphere and phyllosphere bacterial microbiota.

    • Yang Bai
    • , Daniel B. Müller
    •  & Paul Schulze-Lefert

  • Comment |

    Understanding how microbes affect health and the biosphere requires an international initiative, argue Nicole Dubilier, Margaret McFall-Ngai and Liping Zhao.

    • Nicole Dubilier
    • , Margaret McFall-Ngai
    •  & Liping Zhao

  • Outlook |

    Richard Roberts shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Phillip Sharp for their discoveries of split genes, which contain parts that encode protein, called exons, and gaps between them, called introns. Now chief scientific officer at New England Biolabs based in Ipswich, Massachusetts, Roberts talks to Gijsbert Werner about microbes, genetically modified food and the problem with Nobel prizes.

    • Gijsbert Werner

  • Letter |

    The authors develop a mouse model of Enterococcus faecalis colonization to show that enterococci harbouring the bacteriocin-expressing plasmid pPD1 replace indigenous enterococci and have the ability to transfer the plasmid to other enterococci, which enhances the stability of the bacteriocin-expressing bacteria in the gut; this result suggests a therapeutic approach that leverages niche-specificity to eliminate antibiotic-resistant bacteria from infected individuals.

    • Sushma Kommineni
    • , Daniel J. Bretl
    •  & Nita H. Salzman

Browse broader subjects

Browse narrower subjects

Browse Microbial communities across other nature.com journals