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:

"Actinobacteria are some of the most widely distributed bacteria in soils and are well known for their ability to degrade plant residues in pure culture in the laboratory. Yet, despite the importance of microbe-driven decomposition to carbon sequestration in terrestrial systems, their importance and specific activity across diverse environments in the field are unknown. Researchers recently evaluated the ecophysiological roles of Actinobacteria in rice straw residue decomposition in a series of field and microcosm experiments. They found that although Actinobacteria represented only 4.6% of the total bacterial abundance, they encoded 16% of the total carbohydrate-active enzymes (CAZymes) involved in the breakdown of carbohydrates. The researchers also found that Actinobacteria taxonomic and functional compositions were relatively stable during straw decomposition and that the importance of Actinobacteria in decomposition increased as soil fertility decreased..."

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:

"Humans rely on microbial communities in both natural and applied settings. One such applied setting is wastewater treatment plants, which use microbial communities to remove pollutants. However, the stability of the taxonomic diversity in these settings is not well understood. To close this gap, researchers examined how the microbial community in activated sludge changed over time in a full-scale wastewater treatment plant. For the first 3 years of a 9-year series, the microbial community fluctuated around a stable average. Then a bleaching event, marked in red under the timeline, abruptly pushed the community to an alternative stable state, where the originally dominant Actinobacteriota were disproportionally depleted and replaced with Proteobacteria, but these taxonomic changes led to little change in either the metabolic profile of the community or system performance. In a fine-scale analysis of dynamics, the researchers identified cohorts that dominated at different periods..."

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:

"In northern ecosystems, winter carbon loss is estimated to exceed growing season carbon uptake, primarily because of microbial decomposition. Viruses in soil alter microbial carbon cycling by affecting metabolic pathways and killing their hosts, but whether viruses are active under anoxic and sub-freezing soil conditions remains unknown. To find out, a recent study used stable isotope probing (SIP) targeted metagenomics to investigate active microbes in Alaskan Arctic peat soils under simulated winter conditions, with a particular focus on viruses and virus-host dynamics. Overall, 46 bacterial and 243 viral populations actively took up soil water labeled with ¹⁸O and respired CO₂. Active bacteria represented a small proportion of the total microbial community but were able to ferment and degrade organic matter. In contrast, a large diversity of viruses were found to be active, one-third of which were linked to active bacteria..."

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:

"Cases of the fungal disease candidiasis in infants have been increasing over the past two decades, but our understanding of the behavior and evolution of Candida spp. outside laboratory models has been lacking. Researchers assembled new C. albicans and C. parapsilosis genomes using data from premature infant feces, hospital surfaces, clinical samples, and non-hospital environmental samples. Relative to an existing reference genome, the C. parapsilosis genomes analyzed had genomic “hotspots” of single nucleotide variants, and the C. parapsilosis genomes from premature infants had hotspots that matched hospital and subway surface samples, which may suggest a common ancestor. The researchers also analyzed a microbial gene expression time course in one infant being treated for Candida infection. The in situ transcriptomic profiles were highly variable relative to cultured C..."

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:

"Many microbiome studies have matched-pair or matched-set designs, in which data naturally cluster into sets, with some within-set variation in traits of interest. Statistical methods help us make sense of these data, testing hypotheses at the community or operational taxonomic unit (OTU) level. Now, researchers present a new strategy for analyzing matched-set microbial data. The method can be used with both PERMANOVA, a commonly used distance-based method for testing hypotheses at the community level, and the linear decomposition model (LDM), which unifies the community-level and OTU-level tests into one framework. An indicator variable for each set is included as a covariate to constrain comparisons between samples within a set. Simulations using this method showed that the strategy outperformed alternative strategies in a wide range of scenarios, and the flexibility of these methods to allow discrete or continuous traits or interactions to be tested was illustrated with analysis of two real datasets..."

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:

"Our bodies are home to millions of microscopic organisms – our microbiome. While these microbes have many important functions that maintain our health and well-being, our microbiome changes as we age, which can cause infection or inflammation. Understanding these changes in humans is difficult due to our long lifespan and confounding factors such as healthcare and diet. A recent study used an animal model – free-ranging rhesus macaques – to better understand the changes that occur in our microbiomes with age, using a cross-sectional dataset of oral, rectal, and genital swabs collected from 105 macaques belonging to one social group. In contrast to adult macaques, researchers found that infant gut microbial communities had higher abundances of Bifidobacterium and Bacteroides, consistent with a milk-rich diet. The genital microbiome varied substantially between males and females, and while penile microbiomes changed with age, vaginal microbiomes did not..."

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:

"Changes in the gut microbiota are associated with numerous ageing-related disorders. Microbiome rejuvenation through probiotic treatment or faecal microbiota transplantation can promote healthy ageing. However, in animal studies, it remains difficult to successfully prolong the health span of aged mice via gut microbiome manipulation. Researchers recently attempted several methods to rejuvenate the microbiomes of aged mice by co-housing young and old mice, injecting old mice with serum from young mice, and surgically combining young and old mice via their circulatory systems. As mice aged, the gut microbiota composition and gene abundance changed dynamically, but the rejuvenation procedures reversed the deterioration of microbe communities and intestinal immunity in aged mice. According to metagenomics, high abundance of Akkermansia (AK) bacteria and the activity of the butyrate synthesis pathway played key roles in the restorative effects..."

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:

"Certain gut microbes and their metabolites contribute to the progression of benign colorectal adenoma (CRA) into colorectal cancer (CRC), but the specific microbes, metabolites, and mechanisms involved are unclear. To learn more, researchers recently analyzed stool samples from patients with CRA or CRC and normal control (NC) subjects. The levels of certain stool metabolites significantly differed among the groups. For example, myristic acid and norvaline became more abundant with progression from health to CRC. The CRC-associated metabolites were largely branched- chain amino acids and aromatic amino acids and were involved in aminoacyl-tRNA biosynthesis pathways. A metabolite “signature” distinguished CRC samples from NC samples and CRC samples from CRA samples and the relationships among CRC-related metabolites and gut bacteria differed in the different sample types..."

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 gut microbiome interacts intimately with its human host, both in health and in disease. A recent study examined how different states of the gut microbiome might be linked to varying degrees of disease in rats. Researchers exposed rats to different concentrations of dextran sodium sulfate (DSS), a polysaccharide known to induce human-like colitis. The effects on the intestinal microbiome over time were tracked by gene profiling. The results provide some of the first experimental evidence of “alternative states” in the rat intestinal ecosystem. These are distinct microbial profiles related to markers of disease. Importantly, these alternative states were found to be tied to both the host and microbiome, rather than one or the other. That led to a conceptual model of how host inflammatory status and microbiome status interact and how the whole ecosystem may slip into and out of different states of disease..."

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:

"Since its appearance in late 2019, COVID-19 has caused well over one million deaths worldwide. Large-scale testing and contact tracing remain critical for controlling viral spread. Complying with the US CDC and WHO protocols for sample collection requires a ready supply of inexpensive swabs and collection reagents. Unfortunately, CDC-approved clinical-grade sampling supplies are expensive, and additionally, current methods prevent further analysis of the microbiome due to the presence of antibiotics in viral transport media. Researchers sought out new testing supplies in a recent study comparing five consumer-grade swabs and one clinical-grade swab. They found that using 95% ethanol instead of viral transfer media reduced RNase activity, preserving samples for microbiome analysis, and extracting directly from the swab head instead of the surrounding liquid resulted in 2-4x higher RNA recovery than the clinical standard..."

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:

"In the absence of oxygen, some prokaryotes can degrade organic matter via anaerobic digestion. This occurs in natural settings, like wetlands, and industrial ones, like wastewater treatment or biogas production. But what about viruses? Bacteriophages can impact their hosts’ community structure through selective pressure and have been used to influence microbial communities, such as through pathogen control. A recent study examined the virome of anaerobic digestion communities undergoing prophage- inducing environmental stresses. The virome was almost entirely composed of tailed bacteriophages of the order Caudovirales. Metagenome reconstruction revealed 1,092 viral genomes and 120 prokaryotic genomes, and over half of the prokaryotic genomes contained a provirus in their genomic sequence. In general, species of viruses and prokaryotes could be grouped by having similar reactions to stressors. Archaea had the most pronounced reactions to stressors and featured behaviors unique to those species..."

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:

"Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) is a common endocrine disorder in women and is characterized by irregular periods, infertility, and hirsutism. Patients with PCOS also regularly experience gut dysbiosis, but the specific role of dysbiosis in the pathology of PCOS is not clear. To investigate this, researchers administered two different treatments to rats – the androgen dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA) to induce PCOS-like symptoms and antibiotics to deplete the existing microbiota and thereby produce “pseudo germ-free” rats. In the androgen-treated rats, depletion of the microbiota did not protect them from PCOS-like symptoms, but transplanting microbiota from androgen-treated rats into pseudo germ-free rats triggered disruption of reproductive hormone balance and altered liver metabolism..."

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:

"“All happy families look alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” – Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina. According to Tolstoy, a healthy home is the result of many factors falling into harmonious order, whereas disharmony is what happens when even one of these factors is out of place. A new study confirms the same principle holds true for the communities of microbes that determine oral health. Researchers mapped microbial DNA from healthy individuals and individuals with one of three forms of gum infection: chronic periodontitis, localized aggressive periodontitis, or generalized aggressive periodontitis. While it’s known that all three forms of periodontitis are microbially derived, the microbial makeup that gives rise to each remains unclear. High-throughput whole genome sequencing revealed that, like Tolstoy's unhappy homes, no two individuals with disease were alike..."

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:

"Human gut microbes are critical for maintaining the integrity of the GI tract, immune system homeostasis, and host energy metabolism. Alterations in this network can have health consequences, including inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). Antibiotic treatment compromises the composition of the gut microbiome, affecting microbial function and resulting in long-lasting detrimental effects on the host. A recent study examined how different antibiotics affect the ability of gut microbes to control intestinal inflammation. Researchers treated mice with antibiotics prior to fecal microbiota transplantation. They found that antibiotic pre-treatment significantly altered the ability of the microbiota to control intestinal inflammation. Streptomycin- and vancomycin-treated microbes failed to control inflammation, and pathobionts associated with IBD thrived. In contrast, microbes treated with metronidazole were able to control inflammation, and beneficial microbial species were enriched..."

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 period shortly after birth is a critical window for microbiome establishment. Antibiotics can impact this process, often negatively, but most of the research to date has been conducted on full-term infants and has rarely included infants that never received antibiotics, complicating the analysis. A recent study sought to close these gaps and examined the skin and gut microbiomes of preterm infants. While gestational age at birth had some influence on the maturation of the microbiome, postnatal age had a stronger impact. But brief exposure to antibiotics reversed the maturation trajectory between weeks one and three after birth, and antibiotic exposure impacted the abundance of potentially beneficial gut microbes. Some bacteria in our microbiome generate short-chain fatty acids, like butyrate and acetate, that our cells can use, but at three weeks after birth, the antibiotic-exposed infants had an altered microbiome with reduced capacity to produce these important metabolites..."

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:

"Antimicrobial resistance is a looming threat to global health. As a result, the livestock industry is moving away from using antibiotics in feed to enhance growth. But this shift may have led to increased rates of systemic infections and reduced production efficiency. Alternatives for antibiotic growth promotants (AGPs) are needed, but the mechanism behind the efficiency of AGPs is largely unknown. So, a recent study systematically evaluated the composition and function of the chicken gut microbial community in response to AGPs. The impact of AGPs was dependent on the birds' age and diet as well as the intestinal sampling location. Overall, AGPs had a limited impact on the abundances of specific microbial groups but did shift which groups were influential and exclude others. The chicken gut microbiome functionally responded to AGPs by changing the expression of multiple pathways, including by increasing expression of cell wall formation and antimicrobial resistance mechanism genes..."

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:

"Antibiotic resistance is a growing threat to human and animal health, and this problem is accelerated by the transfer of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) between individual bacteria. ARGs tend to accumulate in the gut microbes of animals, and they reflect the resistome, or collection of ARGs, of the environment. Thus, one way to monitor the resistome of an environment could be sampling the gut microbiomes of animals. To that end, researchers examined the gut resistomes of two domesticated honeybee species, _Apis cerana_ and _Apis mellifera_. The resistome corresponded most strongly with the honeybee host species, rather than geographic region. The more heavily managed species, _A. mellifera_, carried the most ARGs and had the heaviest load of transferrable ARGs. However, transferrable ARGs were common in the microbiomes from both honeybee species..."

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:

"Antibiotics are critical treatments for bacterial infections, but antibiotic resistance is a growing problem. Wastewater treatment plants may foster resistance development, since sewage contains both human pathogens and antibiotics or their metabolite. The activated sludge (AS) stage commonly used to treat sewage at these plants is especially microbe-rich and may encourage transfer of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) through reproduction (vertical transfer) or movement of mobile genetic elements (horizontal transfer). To learn more, a recent study profiled ARGs and their neighboring genes at five wastewater treatment plants on three continents. Overall, ARG abundance was lower in AS than in incoming sewage (IN). In addition, ARGs tended to colocalize with plasmids and other mobile genetic elements to a greater extent in IN than AS, indicating decreased horizontal transfer potential..."

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:

"Antibiotic resistance is a growing problem worldwide—and in outer space. Spaceflight can promote biofilm formation and antimicrobial resistance development, and astronauts are especially vulnerable to infection due to the unique demands of spaceflight. To support future space travel, it is critical to understand exactly how spaceflight affects microbial diversity and virulence. To learn more, researchers recently used a machine learning algorithm to analyze sequencing data from the Microbial Tracking (MT)-1 mission, which sampled microbes at eight locations on the International Space Station during three flights. The model predicted the presence of hundreds of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) in the 226 bacterial strains isolated from the flights, including strains of the potentially very pathogenic bacterium Enterobacter bugandensis and the food poisoning-related bacterium Bacillus cereus..."

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:

"Resistance to antibiotics is a growing global threat to human and animal health. Much of the current research into antibiotic resistance has focused on the human gut, but significantly less of it has examined rivers, which are akin to a terrestrial ‘gut.’ To close this gap, researchers examined the antibiotic resistance genes and their hosts in the 3rd longest river in the world, the Yangtze. They identified 1853 species of antibiotic-resistant bacteria that collectively carried 31 types of antibiotic resistance genes. Human pathogenic bacteria carried a disproportionately large share of the resistance genes. Specifically, human pathogens accounted for 5.9% of the host population found in the river sediment, but they carried 46% of the resistance genes there. In the water column, human pathogens carried 64% of the resistance genes while representing only 13.4% of the host population. The dominant antibiotic resistance genes differed from those found in the human gut, anthropogenic systems, or lakes..."

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