This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Infectious microbes don’t stop at the hospital door upon admission. Hospital surfaces serve as a reservoir of microbial life that may colonize patients, resulting in healthcare-associated infections (HAIs). The most vulnerable are critically ill patients in the intensive care unit (ICU), where HAIs represent the leading cause of death. Unfortunately, little is known about how the microbiome of the ICU is established or how it is influenced over time. A new study took advantage of a unique opportunity to examine the evolution of the ICU microbiome. Researchers examined microbes isolated from ICU surfaces before, during, and after hospital renovations closed the unit. Using DNA sequencing, they found that the greatest bacterial diversity existed before ICU closure..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Metagenomic analysis frequently plays an important role in development pipelines for human fecal microbiome-related products, but validation and standardization of the methods used to extract DNA and assemble sequence libraries for these studies is currently lacking. To close this gap, researchers recently characterized existing protocols for accuracy and precision. First, they tested the quantification accuracy by using a defined mock community of bacteria. Then, the protocols that performed as expected were evaluated for both within- and inter-laboratory precision metrics. The protocols were also tested against the MOSAIC Standards Challenge samples. Lastly, they defined performance metrics for the recommended protocols to provide best-practice guidance. The uptake of the recommendations generated here should improve reproducibility in human metagenomic research and therefore facilitate development and commercialization of human microbiome-related products..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"High-quality reference genomes are needed to understand the physiology and function of uncultured microbes in complex ecosystems. Metagenomics has been an incredibly useful tool for studying microbial communities, but assigning sequence assemblies accurately to genomes is difficult in microbial species or strains that lack a reference genome. These 'consensus genomes' have lower resolution than those generated from cultured isolates. Combining single-cell genomics with metagenomics may allow us to overcome these methodological weaknesses. Thus, researchers recently developed a framework called SMAGLinker, which integrates single-cell genomes from microfluidic droplets and uses them as guides for metagenome assembly. Compared to metagenomics alone, SMAGLinker showed more precise contig binning and higher recovery rates of rRNA and plasmids in a mock microbial community. In human gut and skin microbiota samples, SMAGLinker returned more genomes than the conventional metagenomics frameworks..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

This resource is a collection of articles, book chapters, and videos about the Human Microbiome.The Microbiome is loosely defined as microorganisms, such as bacteria, that are found throughout the human body. It plays an important role in our understanding of our interactions with microorganisms and can help better understand which microorganisms are associated with clinical conditions and can help to improve the overall state of human health. The Human Microbiome provides some background information on microorganisms in general. There is a lot of Microbiome information provided. Some in the form of informative video content, some in the form of an online course at MIT and links to papers and online books and other important websites that inform a lot about the microbiome.  Finally, since this is intended to be a resource for Lander College for Women, a Womens Jewish College, there is also information about the impact of the human microbiome on women's health, as well as information regarding a parallel concept in Jewish Philosophy, that a human being is a microcosm of a world.-Neil Normand, Touro University, 2021

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"The Mars500 mission was a psychosocial isolation experiment designed to study the effects of long-term space travel on humans, but it also presented a unique opportunity to study human microbiota. Our microbiota play key roles in our health and are thus important subjects of study. However, it is often difficult to distinguish between resident and transient microbes and to control outside variables, but in the Mars500 mission the subjects were isolated for 520 days while on a standardized diet. Samples were collected during and after the isolation period, and researchers assessed the diversity of their salivary microbiota. While time, diet, and individual subject differences each had a significant impact on microbiota variation, the individual differences between subjects had the greatest influence..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"CrAss-like phages are the most abundant family of bacteriophages in the human gut. Despite their abundance, only three types of crAss-like phages have been isolated in pure culture. Now, a new study reports the successful isolation of a new crAss-like phage, ΦcrAss002. Researchers used fecal fermentation with antibiotics to select for gram-negative bacteria including Bacteroides, a favorite target of crAss-like phages. That led to the isolation of ΦcrAss002, which infects Bacteroides xylanisolvens. Experiments showed that, despite being a lytic phage, ΦcrAss002 did not form plaques on bacterial lawns or lyse liquid cultures of sensitive bacteria, even at high titers. ΦcrAss002 and B. xylanisolvens can co-exist at high levels in co-cultures, which is consistent with their co-abundance in the human gut. This co-existence between phage and host is also found in the previously described ΦcrAss001..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Skin, the largest organ of the human body by weight, hosts a variety of microorganisms that can influence health. Skin microbes play a role in immunity, wound healing, colonization resistance, and skin disorders. Unfortunately, while mouse models have uncovered some host pathways influenced by skin microorganisms, more studies are needed in healthy human skin. A recent study uses a 3D skin tissue model – human skin equivalents – to study the effects of the microbiome on skin health. Researchers introduced bacterial isolates from healthy individuals to an in vitro skin model. Transcriptomics demonstrated that microbial presence on 3D skin tissue significantly altered patterns of gene expression in particular influencing genes involved in apoptosis, proliferation, and the extracellular matrix. Microbes also affected the thickness of the epidermal layer reduced the number of actively proliferating cells and increased filaggrin expression..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"The composition of our gut microbial community has been linked directly to our health, but researchers are only beginning to study the impact of its functional metabolic behavior, which can shift in response to external factors. Microbial production of H₂S in the gut is one such function, and it may be a colorectal cancer trigger. A recent study used publicly available datasets to examine the sulfur metabolism genes in our gut microbiota. Sulfur metabolism genes were more abundant and diverse than previously thought and were correlated with colorectal cancer. The researchers also examined two key sulfate reductases: dissimilatory sulfite reductases (Dsr) and anaerobic sulfite reductase (asr) and found that genes for asr were twice as abundant as genes for Dsr, suggesting that asr is a more important contributor to sulfate reduction in the human gut and found that genes for asr were twice as abundant as genes for Dsr, suggesting that asr is a more important contributor to sulfate reduction in the human gut..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Heritable traits such as height or disease vary from person to person. One way to explain these variations is by looking at the genomes of large populations. That’s the aim of genome-wide association studies, or GWASs. Unfortunately, GWASs often come up short – explaining only a small fraction of trait heritability. That has many researchers looking to the human microbiome for this “missing heritability”. But according to a new a perspective piece, there could be a few problems with that approach. While individuals have only one genomic sequence, they’re host to numerous microbiomes that evolve over time. That means that it would likely be incorrect to consider the microbiome as an extension of the human genome. Additionally, microbiomes may be strongly shaped by environmental factors, making them irrelevant to the genetic component of human heritability. Microbiome sequencing data could still have a place in heritability studies..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Background: Lactic acid bacteria (LAB) produce various bioactive secondary metabolites (SMs), which endow LAB with a protective role for the host. However, the biosynthetic potentials of LAB-derived SMs remain elusive, particularly in their diversity, abundance, and distribution in the human microbiome. Thus, it is still unknown to what extent LAB-derived SMs are involved in microbiome homeostasis.Results: Here, we systematically investigate the biosynthetic potential of LAB from 31,977 LAB genomes, identifying 130,051 BGCs of 2,849 gene cluster families (GCFs). Most of these GCFs are species-specific or even strain-specific and uncharacterized yet. Analyzing 748 human-associated metagenomes, we gain an insight into the profile of LAB BGCs, which are highly diverse and niche-specific in the human microbiome..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.