Our Mission: To explore and understand the microbial world using ecogenomics

ACE researchers Steven Robbins, Lauren Messer, Caitlin Singleton, Aileen Geers, and Alex Baker authored a new publication in Nature Microbiology, entitled “A genomic view of the reef-building coral Porites lutea and its microbial symbionts.” By sequencing the genomes of the coral Porites lutea, its algal symbiont, and 52 bacterial and archaeal genomes, we could look at the whole library of genes each organism has to work with to see how their metabolisms interlink. This is very exciting in a number of ways. Researchers have studied the symbiosis between corals and their algal symbionts (Symbiodinium) for many years, but the role of the bacteria and archaea in coral health is just now being recognized. This is the first bacterial/archaeal community from corals to be sequenced and the first time we’re getting to look under the hood to see what these microbes do. It’s also the first time each member of the coral community (i.e. the coral, algae, and bacteria/archaea) have been looked at as a unit, which we think will be integral if we are to properly understand coral biology.https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-019-0532-4#Sec19

Our method for experimental testing of a phage host-range without the need for culturing the host has been just published in Nature Microbiology. It involves fluorescent staining of anonymous phages collected from an environment which are combined with anonymous environmental bacteria, and the subset of bacteria tagged by fluorescent viruses is collected by fluorescence activated cells sorting and analysed on single-cell level. This "viral tagging" method  has been demonstrated on human gut microbiome to explore possible interactions between phages and their hosts coming from different human volunteers which can have implications for faecal microbiota transplant therapy. The resulting host-phage network revealed hosts for hundreds of previously unknown viruses and it showed that the phages are mostly species-specific (and not strain-specific as previously though), and only a smaller number of phages have a wider host-range. In addition, we found out that the phages in the human gut have possibly low burst sizes and that the prophage induction in the gut is common, thus the phages do not perturb the human gut microbiome composition heavily on a daily basis.