Daniel McDonald

TL;DR: The utility of the living data resource and cross-cohort comparison is demonstrated to confirm existing associations between the microbiome and psychiatric illness and to reveal the extent of microbiome change within one individual during surgery, providing a paradigm for open microbiome research and education.

TL;DR: A series of studies introduces a forensics approach that could eventually be used to independently evaluate results obtained using more traditional forensic practices, and can use a high-throughput pyrosequencing-based approach to quantitatively compare the bacterial communities on objects and skin to match the object to the individual with a high degree of certainty.

TL;DR: To understand the generalizability of microbiota-based diagnostic models of metabolic disease, the gut microbiota was characterized of 7,009 individuals from 14 districts within 1 province in China and among phenotypes, host location showed the strongest associations with microbiota variations.

TL;DR: A performance-optimized algorithm for assigning marker gene sequences generated on next-generation sequencing platforms to operational taxonomic units (OTUs) for microbial community analysis is presented and it is shown that subsampled open-reference OTU picking yields results that are highly correlated with those generated by “classic” open- reference OTUpicking through comparisons on three well-studied datasets.

TL;DR: The relative abundance of faecal Bacteroides was negatively correlated with an altered GABA-mediated response in a depression patient cohort and genome-based metabolic modelling of the human gut microbiota revealed multiple genera with the predicted capability to produce or consume GABA.