Robin D. Knight

TL;DR: Analysis of the microbiota of genetically obese ob/ob mice, lean ob/+ and wild-type siblings, and their ob/+ mothers, all fed the same polysaccharide-rich diet, indicates that obesity affects the diversity of the gut microbiota and suggests that intentional manipulation of community structure may be useful for regulating energy balance in obese individuals.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors examined how the intestinal environment affects microbial genome evolution and found that lateral gene transfer, mobile elements, and gene amplification have played important roles in affecting the ability of gut-dwelling Bacteroidetes to vary their cell surface, sense their environment, and harvest nutrient resources present in the distal intestine.

TL;DR: The distribution and causes of secondary deviations from the canonical genetic code are examined, with the majority of non-standard codes arise from alterations in the tRNA, with most occurring by post-transcriptional modifications, such as base modification or RNA editing, rather than by substitutions within tRNA anticodons.

TL;DR: It is shown here that a simple model of processes acting at the nucleotide level explains codon usage across a large sample of species and quantitatively predicts responses of individual codons and amino acids to genome composition.

TL;DR: It is shown that if theoretically possible code structures are limited to reflect plausible biological constraints, and amino acid similarity is quantified using empirical data of substitution frequencies, the canonical code is at or very close to a global optimum for error minimization across plausible parameter space.