Manolito Torralba

TL;DR: The Human Microbiome Project Consortium reported the first results of their analysis of microbial communities from distinct, clinically relevant body habitats in a human cohort; the insights into the microbial communities of a healthy population lay foundations for future exploration of the epidemiology, ecology and translational applications of the human microbiome as discussed by the authors.

TL;DR: The Human Microbiome Project has analysed the largest cohort and set of distinct, clinically relevant body habitats so far, finding the diversity and abundance of each habitat’s signature microbes to vary widely even among healthy subjects, with strong niche specialization both within and among individuals.

TL;DR: The Human Microbiome Project (HMP) Consortium has established a population-scale framework which catalyzed significant development of metagenomic protocols resulting in a broad range of quality-controlled resources and data including standardized methods for creating, processing and interpreting distinct types of high-throughput metagenomics data available to the scientific community as mentioned in this paper.

TL;DR: High throughput microbial 16S ribosomal RNA gene sequencing indicated that diversity, richness and composition of howler GI microbiomes varied with host habitat in relation to diet, and a reduction in the number of genes related to butyrate production and hydrogen metabolism in the microbiomes of howlers occupying suboptimal habitats may impact host health.

TL;DR: Results from an initial reference genome sequencing of 178 microbial genomes allow for ~40% of random sequences from the microbiome of the gastrointestinal tract to be associated with organisms based on the match criteria used, suggesting that the authors are still far from saturating microbial species genetic data sets.