New mothers have long been told that ‘breast is best’ for their babies, and new research published in Genome Biology adds to the evidence. The researchers looked at the gut microbiome and found that breastfeeding changed the way that the babies expressed immune system genes.
bacteria archive.
Biofuels have been controversial – they use land, water, fertiliser and other resources that could better be used in growing food. So what’s the solution – perhaps farmed seaweed and a genetically engineered bacterium?
According to some blog reports, Lynn Margulis, Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, died on 22 November 2011, aged 73, following a stroke. Margulis developed the endosymbiotic theory of the evolution of the prokaryotic cell.
Barrel clover (Medicacago trunculata) is a small clover native to Australia and used for pasture. This legume is rather more exciting than it looks, however – because of its small diploid genome and its close relationship to the food and forage plant alfalfa, it is a useful genomic toolbox and provides an insight into rhizobial evolution. An EU-funded international consortium of researchers have sequenced the genome of M trunculata and published the results in Nature.
Hints and tips from Nucleic Acids Research: Detection of recombination events in bacterial genomes from large population samples
Because bacteria don’t reproduce sexually, and so do not have the opportunity to produce offspring with new genetic material, horizontal gene transfer (HGT) – bacteria acquiring DNA from other organisms – is an important part of bacterial evolution. In a letter in Nature, researchers have shown that this genetic juggling happens in the human microbiome.
Hints and tips from Nature Methods: An improved algorithm for genomic analysis allows scientists to build remarkably accurate and complete genomic sequences from single bacterial cells.
Want to socialise and share diet tips with people who share a similar gut microbiome? Now you can through My.Microbes, in return for a stool sample and €1451 (about $2000 or £1300), which is about two-thirds of the actual cost. Fancy having your gut sequenced?
Deltaproteobacteria are aerobic and anaerobic Gram-negative bacteria. A team of researchers from the UK and USA, including the J Craig Venter Institute, the University of California at San Diego, and Illumina Cambridge, have used single-cell genome amplification, sequencing, and assembly techniques to assemble a genome from a single, uncultured cell.
Counting down – two weeks to go! Genome Engineering is hosting the March Issue of the Carnival of Evolution. We’ve had some good submissions already, but if you have written any blog posts on the science behind evolution, and want to increase your hit rate, please submit them by the end of February using the submission form.
