Rob Knight

TL;DR: The results demonstrate the importance of diet as a determinant of gut microbiome composition and suggest the need to control for dietary variation when evaluating the composition of the human gut microbiome.

TL;DR: The largest human microbiota time series analysis to date is presented, covering two individuals at four body sites over 396 timepoints and finds that despite stable differences between body sites and individuals, there is pronounced variability in an individual's microbiota across months, weeks and even days.

TL;DR: The potential of Fast UniFrac is shown using examples from three data types: Sanger-sequencing studies of diverse free-living and animal-associated bacterial assemblages and from the gut of obese humans as they diet, pyrosequencing data integrated from studies of the human hand and gut, and PhyloChip data from a study of citrus pathogens.

TL;DR: HUMAnN2 is developed, a tiered search strategy that enables fast, accurate, and species-resolved functional profiling of host-associated and environmental communities and introduces ‘contributional diversity’ to explain patterns of ecological assembly across different microbial community types.

TL;DR: The variation within and between individuals in microbial ecology illustrated by this study emphasizes the challenges inherent in defining what constitutes a “healthy” bacterial community; addressing these challenges will be critical for the International Human Microbiome Project.