Nathan P. McNulty

TL;DR: Temperature was significantly correlated with shifts in ecotype abundance, and laboratory experiments confirmed different temperature optima and tolerance ranges for cultured strains, which appeared to play a role in shaping different distributions.

TL;DR: A gnotobiotic mouse model is developed where the microbiota is reduced to one bacterial species, and the antibody repertoire to a single, monoclonal IgA against the bacterium's capsular polysaccharide to underscore the adaptive immune system's critical role in establishing a sustainable host-microbial relationship.

TL;DR: Competition for nutrients contained in diverse types of plant cell wall-associated polysaccharides may explain the evolution of substrate-specific catabolic gene modules in common bacterial members of the human gut microbiota.

TL;DR: This work used massively parallel sequencing to monitor the relative abundance of tens of thousands of transposon mutants of a saccharolytic human gut bacterium, Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron, as they established themselves in wild-type and immunodeficient gnotobiotic mice, in the presence or absence of other human gut commensals.

TL;DR: The findings show that mice containing a sequenced model human gut microbiome can serve as part of a preclinical discovery pipeline designed to identify the effects of existing or new bacterial species with purported health benefits on the gut microbiomes of various human populations.