News

The Microbiome Insights team was pleased to visit Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing on Emory University campus in August to lead a 2-day workshop on methods for microbiome analysis: both 16S rRNA gene sequencing and shotgun metagenomics. With a growing awareness that microbiome analysis may...

Obesity and type 2 diabetes (T2D) often occur together, and metabolic disease is linked to alterations in the gut microbiome but the changes associated uniquely with obesity versus T2D have been unclear. However, data now show that obesity along with medications and supplements like...

Rapidly aging populations and the increasing prevalence of age-related diseases are issues facing many societies. While aging is a complex and not fully understood process, the microbiome and diet are receiving attention as potential ways to support healthy aging.

The inability of some infant microbiomes to perform carbohydrate metabolism may be a factor in the development of allergies later in life. Metagenomic analysis of the microbiomes of human infants who went on to develop allergies revealed a lack of genes encoding for carbohydrate breakdown and...

An ambitious new study followed 132 patients suffering from inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) for one year, in order to generate longitudinal molecular profiles of host and microbial activity. In doing so it captured the most comprehensive description to date of host and microbe activities in IBD.

A skin microbiome study undertaken by Amway in collaboration with Microbiome Insights has now been published in the scientific journal mBio. The study, which enrolled 495 people (aged 9 to 78) who provided over 2500 skin swab samples, was the largest survey of the healthy human skin microbiome ever...

The roles of complex microbial communities in soil and ocean environments is a relatively new area of inquiry, spurred on by the same advances in sequencing technology that have revealed the importance of human microbiomes in health. With emerging data, the importance of these microbial communities...

New investigations using a gene knockout mouse model showed that neonatal exposure to antibiotics had a long-lasting effect on both the microbial community and mucosal immunity in the gut. The data also shone light on how the Nod2 gene alters the risk of inflammatory disease.

The numbers, types, and functions of gut microbes and the molecules they produce vary greatly over time and between individuals; however, there is new evidence showing that the metabolic function these microbes perform is conserved in some cases. This new data comes from an analysis of the gut...

Thousands of new microbial species making up the human microbiome have been identified from metagenome samples collected around the world. By reconstructing the microbial genomes found in over 9000 metagenome datasets, the microbial genomes of the unnamed species extend the knowledge of the human...