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Gassler et al. implant a free-living bacterium into fungal cells to study early steps in the establishment of an endosymbiosis. They observe vertical transmission of the bacteria despite initial host stress, with fungal defense responses attenuating over time, indicating a shift from antagonism toward commensalism.

Cross-study analysis defines fecal microbial species associated with colorectal cancer.

Environmental metagenomic explorations show that Mirusviricota lineages lack essential replication and transcription genes and contain spliceosomal introns, suggesting nuclear reproduction.

Acute systemic immune activation may affect gut-luminal colonisation dynamics. Here, the authors show that LPS exposure in mice elevates gut-luminal oxygen species levels, inhibiting the microbiota and enabling pathogen growth through aerobic respiration.

Intracellular Salmonella enterica uses a type III secretion system to secrete more than 30 effector proteins into host cells. Here, Newson et al. generate six mutant strains deficient in different sets of effectors, thus providing insights on the interdependency or functional redundancy between effectors in vivo.

Marine microbial eukaryotes and zooplankton display enormous diversity and largely unexplored physiologies. Here, the authors use metatranscriptomics to analyze four organismal size fractions from open-ocean stations, providing the largest reference collection of eukaryotic transcripts from any single biome.

Sequencing the microbial species present in complex metagenomic samples is made easier with a method that groups genes by co-abundance.

A framework for metagenomic variation analysis to explore variation in the human microbiome is developed; the study describes SNPs, short indels and structural variants in 252 faecal metagenomes of 207 individuals from Europe and North America.

The plant general non-self response system is triggered by leaf microbiota members and, in turn, impacts their colonization.

The schooner Tara sailed 140,000 km across the global oceans to sample diverse marine ecosystems and plankton communities. In the Review, members of the Tara Oceans project highlight how resulting data can be used for an integrated understanding of ocean biology.

A study presents an approach to establish and track a new endosymbiotic partnership by implanting bacteria in a non-host fungus and shows that stable inheritance of the implanted bacteria is possible with positive selection.

Anatomically resolved maps of small molecules along the gut of colonized and germ-free mice reveal distinct spatial patterns throughout the gut. These patterns can, in part, be associated with specific microorganisms producing bioactive compounds.

Using data from the Tara Pacific expedition, this study reports the biogeography and the diversity of microbiomes collected from corals, fish and plankton in 99 reefs across the Pacific Ocean. The large richness of Pacific Ocean reef microorganisms, when extrapolated to all fish and corals of the Pacific, represents the current estimated total prokaryotic diversity for the entire Earth.

Global ocean microbiome survey reveals the bacterial family ‘Candidatus Eudoremicrobiaceae’, which includes some of the most biosynthetically diverse microorganisms in the ocean environment.

Bioremediation via microbial inoculation often performs poorly in real-world conditions. Here, the authors show that bacterial inoculants may fail to establish in complex soil microbiomes because they open new niches that facilitate growth of resident microbes.

We analysed 149,842 environmental genomes from multiple habitats and compiled a curated catalogue of 404,085 functionally and evolutionarily significant novel gene families exclusive to uncultivated prokaryotic taxa spanning multiple species.

Using data from the Tara Pacific expedition to investigate symbiont fidelity and patterns of gene expression across a thermal gradient, this study shows that Pocillopora corals have a three-tiered strategy of thermal acclimatization that is underpinned by host–photosymbiont specificity, host transcriptomic plasticity, and differential photosymbiotic associations under extreme warming.

Bacterial symbionts of the Endozoicomonadaceae family are frequently found in marine animals but are poorly understood. Using data from the Tara Pacific expedition, this study of Endozoicomonadaceae ecology at an ocean basin-scale reveals that corals across the Pacific Ocean have different host-symbiont association strategies that are determined at the bacterial lineage level.

Using data from the Tara Pacific expedition, this study shows that a key driver of variation in coral telomere DNA length across the Pacific Ocean is the history of water temperature. The telomere lengths of short-lived, stress-sensitive Pocillopora colonies are more sensitive to seasonal temperature variations than those of long-lived and stress-resistant Porites colonies.

Arabidopsis thaliana plants lacking the rbohD gene, which encodes the NADPH oxidase RBOHD, have an altered leaf microbiome including an enrichment of opportunistic pathogens, indicating that RBOHD is essential for maintaining leaf microbiota homeostasis.

A survey of species-level genes from 13,174 publicly available metagenomes shows that most species-level genes are specific to a single habitat, encode a small number of protein families and are under low positive (adaptive) pressure.

Homeostasis of the intestinal epithelium is crucial for the maintenance of the epithelial barrier. Here, the authors show that mir-802 ablation in the mouse intestine impairs enterocyte differentiation and glucose absorption, enhances Paneth cell function by increasing Tmed9-mediated defensin secretion, and increases epithelial cell turnover.

Using genome-resolved metagenomics for 41 Arctic seawater samples, this ecogenomic analysis of 530 metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs) from the polar Arctic Ocean reveals uncultured Arctic bacterial and archaeal MAGs, their gene expression patterns, habitat preferences and metabolic potential.

Conducting a series of removal experiments using synthetic leaf-inhabiting bacterial communities, the authors identify several keystone strains and show that priority effects drive phyllosphere community assembly.

Analysing a global metagenomic data set from the Tara Oceans expeditions, the authors find that the distribution of marine giant virus communities is tightly coupled to that of eukaryotic microorganisms, that these communities are particularly distinct in polar biomes, and that they may sometimes be highly similar both on the surface and at depth.

Metagenomic analysis based on universal phylogenetic marker gene (MG)-based operational taxonomic units (mOTUs) is a useful strategy, especially for microbial species without reference genomes. Here, the authors develop mOTUs2, an updated and functionally extended profiling tool for microbial abundance, activity and population profiling.

The biology of many marine protists, such as stramenopiles, remains obscure. Here, the authors exploit single-cell genomics and metagenomics to analyze the genome content and apparent oceanic distribution of seven prevalent lineages of uncultured heterotrophic stramenopiles.

Nitrogen fixation in oceans is facilitated by associations between marine phytoplankton and cyanobacteria such as UCYN-A. Here, Cornejo-Castillo et al. show that UCYN-A diversified in the late Cretaceous under strong purifying selection to become lineage-specific symbiont partners with different prymnesiophytes.

High salt intake changed the gut microbiome and increased T_H17 cell numbers in mice, and reduced intestinal survival of Lactobacillus species, increased the number of T_H17 cells and increased blood pressure in humans.

Increased potential for branched-chain amino acid and lipopolysaccharide biosynthesis in the gut microbiome of insulin-resistant individuals suggests that changes in the serum metabolome induced by dysbiosis, and driven by only a handful of species, contribute to the development of diabetes.

Analysis of the gut microbial gene composition in obese and non-obese individuals shows marked differences in bacterial richness between the two groups, with individuals with low richness exhibiting increased adiposity, insulin resistance, dyslipidaemia and inflammation; only a few bacterial marker species are needed to distinguish between individuals with high and low bacterial richness, providing potential for future diagnostic tools.

Using the Tara Oceans dataset, this study describes global patterns of diatom diversity, abundance and adaptation. The authors identify 25 distinct communities, with the Arctic as a hotspot, and highlight diatom transcriptional features. These insights aid understanding of the ecological roles of diatoms and their responses to global change.

Plankton communities in the top 150 m of the nutrient-depleted, oligotrophic global ocean that are most associated with carbon export include unexpected taxa, such as Radiolaria, alveolate parasites, and Synechococcus and their phages, and point towards potential functional markers predicting a significant fraction of the variability in carbon export in these regions.

This study presents the results of the second round of the Critical Assessment of Metagenome Interpretation challenges (CAMI II), which is a community-driven effort for comprehensively benchmarking tools for metagenomics data analysis.

WISH-tags can be used in combination with quantitative polymerase chain reaction or next-generation sequencing to decipher population dynamics at the strain level within plant and mammalian microbiotas.

Microbes induce an immune response in plants that includes transcriptional changes and biosynthesis of defence molecules. Analysis of both transcriptome and metabolome output to multiple bacteria identifies a common non-self response to microorganisms.

Metagenomic, chemical and biomass analyses of topsoil samples from around the world reveal spatial and environmental trends in microbial community composition and genetic diversity.

Short-term exposure to a high-fat diet reduces colonization resistance to Salmonella Typhimurium infection in mice and is associated with increase bile salts and plasmid transfer; however, E. coli can provide a protective effect under these conditions.

Growing evidence from metagenome-wide association studies link multiple common disorders to microbial dysbiosis but effects of drug treatment are often not accounted for; here, the authors re-analyse two previous metagenomic studies of type 2 diabetes mellitus patients together with a novel cohort to determine the effects of the widely prescribed antidiabetic drug metformin and highlight the need to distinguish the effects of a disease from the effects of treatment on the gut microbiota.

The specI software automatically and highly accurately delineates and assigns bacterial species based on a set of universal marker genes that it extracts from sequenced genomes.

A method and software for profiling microbial communities from shotgun sequence data uses universal single-copy marker sequences for accurate species-level assignment. The method can classify species lacking a reference genome sequence, making it possible to analyze the large fraction of unknown microbes in the human gut.

The assembly and analysis of complete genomes and large genomic fragments have tripled the number of known ocean viruses and uncovered the potentially important roles they play in nitrogen and sulfur cycling.

Li et al. provide the largest catalog of genes in the human gut microbiome based on samples from >1,200 individuals across three continents.