On December 14, Leonardo Moreno successfully defended his thesis, titled "On Bioinformatics of the Human Gut," for which he earned the distinguished M...

In December a portion of the lab traveled to snowy Banff, Canada to attend the Keystone Symposia Meeting “The Human Microbe: Ecology and Evolution.”...

Former graduate student Albane Ruaud recently saw her machine learning tool published

Our recent discovery of silent flagellin in the human gut was featured in Science Immunology.

Here, we address this long-standing question in microbiome sciences.

Last week, Jessica (Jess) Sutter successfully defended her thesis titled “Phylogeny, pangenomics, and predicted functional diversity of maize...

Our new paper on the evolutionary histories of the human gut microbiota is out in Science. The work was led by Taichi Suzuki and Liam Fitzstevens...

Congratulations to Ruth Ley, who was awarded a certificate in recognition of her induction into the Leopoldina Academy during the annual ceremony held...

Our new pre-print is up on bioRxiv! Led by Nicholas Youngblut, this work presents ResMiCo, a powerful tool for optimising metagenome assemblies.

Meta...

Congrats to Stacey Heaver for publishing her work on inositol lipid metabolism in Nature Microbiology.

"It’s time to make the survey of humanity’s ‘second genome’ more complete." A perspective piece on how to fill in the microbiome map by Ruth E. Ley.

Congratulations to Prof. Ruth Ley who has joined the Board of Trustees of the Jung Foundation! The Jung Foundation for Science and Research was...

Jacobo successfully defended his thesis titled “Insights into the human gut microbiome and its link with obesity and cardiometabolic diseases”.

Our new pre-print is out!

Congratulations to Lara Berg for successfully completing her Masters degree in the Ley Lab! For her thesis, Lara charaterised strain-level metabolic...

Congratulations are in order for Paul OG Jorzik, who has successfully completed his Master's degree. Paul completed his thesis in the Ley Lab where he...

A new review from the Ley Lab from Hagay Enav and Ruth Ley discussing the establishment of the infant gut microbiome at strain-level resolution.

Congratulations to postdoctoral researcher Kelsey Huus who was awarded an EMBO fellowship to run the µHEAT study

New article discussing the genetic manipulation of gut microbes and complex communities written by Project Leader James Marsh and Ruth Ley

We are pleased and very proud to announce that postdoctoral researcher Taichi Suzuki has accepted a joint assistant professor position at ASU

In our new publication in Environmental Microbiology, we explore the use of "genome-based diversity" to gain insight into how gut microbiomes differ...

New preprint by Albane Ruaud and colleagues where they present endoR: their tool to interpret machine learning models. They also applied endoR to...

Congratulations to all doctoral students that presented their work, especially Andrea Borbon, Mirabeau Mbong, and Yihua Liu who were also recognized...

In this YouTube video, Nick Youngblut and colleagues discuss their latest work on the Archaea of the vertebrate gut.

Read the original research paper...

Archaea are often mistaken as bacteria, given that both are small, single-cell organisms. However, archaea are as genetically different from bacteria...

Ever wonder if H.pylori was the only gut microbe that tracked human population as they migrated out of Africa? Here we show evidence that others did...

Check out Hagay Enav's new tool, SynTracker, for comparing microbial strains using comparative synteny. It requires remarkably small fractions of...

The 1929 Nobel Prize was given for pyrotherapy: heating people up to 41C to kill the Treponema causing syphilis. Ever wonder what fever does to the...

Here, doctoral student Michael Bell prepares samples for the Cryo-EM. Please see the Join Us page for more details!

We have a new Doctor! Last week, Albane Ruaud defended her thesis titled “Analysis of human gut metagenomes for the prediction of host traits with...

This week saw our newest pre-print arrive on bioRxiv! Postdoc Stacey Heaver shows that inositol lipid production is more widespread in bacteria than...

Our contribution to encouraging bacterial classification to match phylogeny is in this pitch to rename Catabacter as Christensenella, based on whole...

Welter et al.'s analysis of the evolutionary history of Psychrobacter is out in mSystems. Her phylogenomic analysis, combined with the outcome of...

Daphne Welter is our second graduate student to have defended during the pandemic. She presented her thesis entitled “Insights into the ecology and...

The Otto Bayer Award came with a cartoon! Thank you to the Bayer Foundation for a very nice event.

Methanomassiliicoccales are lesser known members of the human gut archaeome that use methylated amines, including trimethylamine, in methane...

The Bayer Foundation announced today that Ruth Ley is the 2020 recipient of the Otto Bayer Award. We are very grateful to the foundation for this...

In this review, Taichi Suzuki takes on the challenge of thinking through how the microbiome can play a role in the process of human genetic adaptation...

Graduate students Tanja Schön, Michael Bell and Albane Ruaud won in all three categories!

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.11.10.376293v1

The Archaea remain more mysterious than the Bacteria as they are comparatively...

Here is a story of a pathobiont returning to the sea.

It started with polar bear feces collected off the arctic ice: diversity dominated by Psychroba...

Ruth was elected to the Leopoldina (German National Academy of Sciences) in June.

The Leopoldina originated in 1652 as a classical scholarly society...

We know from previous work that people with a lactase-non-persistent (LNP) genotype have more Bifidobacteria in their guts, but what kinds? Victor...

Here Nick Youngblut uses tree-based approaches for comparing human gut metagenomes. This is similar to using UniFrac for 16S rRNA datasets. And...

This week saw the arrival of our newest addition: a scimaX mass spectrometer! After years of planning (and a pandemic), installation was completed...

We are pleased to see Liz Johnson and Stacey Heaver's paper on Bacteroides sphingolipids out in Nature Communications!

https://www.nature.com/article...

A big congratulations to Stacey Heaver who successfully defended her PhD this week! It certainly was an affair to remember, with COVID-19 forcing the...

Congratulations are in order for Claudia Frick, who is the recipient of a CMFI Young Investigator's Grant! Claudia is a senior postdoc in the Ley Lab...

Yestarday afternoon, we had a toast for Priyanka, a reasearch technician who is leaving the lab in a few days. All the best to her. And of course we...

Today our new pre-print was published on bioRxiv! Shining a spotlight on two of our favorite bugs, we show that co-occurence of Christensenella and Me...

2019 is comming to an end, but the holidays are not the only reason to celebrate in the Ley Lab; we close the year with three new publicatons!

First,...

Liam Fitzstevens, a PhD student in our lab, yesterday took home the Best Poster Award at the PhD Symposium organized by the Max Planck Institute for...

We are proud to annouce the two latest preprints from the Ley Lab, this time courtesy of the bioinformatics arm of the lab, which created two tools...

The Mey Generalbau Triathlon recently coursed through the heart of Tübingen drawing thousands of participants from near and far. The Ley and Angenent...

We are very happy to announce that Professor Ruth Ley is now an elected EMBO Member! Ruth joins a league of more than 1800 researchers around the...

It is our great pleasure to report that Zach Henseler graduated on the weekend with his PhD! Zach and Ruth attended the Commencement Ceremony at...

Congratulations to Ley Lab Group Leader, Nicholas Youngblut, and Postdoc William Walters, who saw their research on the vertebrate microbiome publishe...

Our new preprint was released today on bioRxiv! Interactions between the gut microbiome and mucosal immunoglobulins A, M and G in the developing...

Our paper on age- and sex-dependent microbial diversity is out! Titled Age- and Sex-Dependent Patterns of Gut Microbial Diversity in Human Adults,...

Congratulations to Stacey Heaver who won a Travel Award for her “Poster Flash-Talk” at the recent FEBS Sphingolipid Biology conference in Cascais,...

Our recent Cell Host & Microbe paper, relating human salivary amylase (AMY1) gene copy number to microbiome diversity, is being featured across the...

The last issue of Cell Host and Microbe is dedicated to phages and includes our study on viruses in the human gut. This paper shows how we examined...

Curious about your gut microbiome and how you digest lactose? We’re looking for hundreds more mothers to participate at our partnering Institute of...

Leonardo Moreno -a PhD student from our lab- and colleagues have recently published on BioRxiv a research article on the relationship between...

We enjoyed a nice Xmas party organized by our colleagues. We also played the funny German version of secret Santa as well as having a superb dinner,...

Dr. Nicholas Youngblut, a project leader in our lab, has recently published on BioRxiv a research article on how host diet and evolutionary history...

Yesterday, Jessica Summers, a PhD student from our lab, earned the second place in the Best Oral Presentations of the 2018 Joint PhD Student Symposium...

This afternoon, Albane Ruaud, a PhD student from our lab, has been awarded with the prize to the Best Short Talk of the 2018 Joint PhD Student...

Dr. Victor Schmidt, a postdoc in our lab, is bringing a talk microbiome-mediated lactose tolerance across ethnicities in the International Conference...

Many people from all the institute joined us to celebrate our great inauguration event.

We want to share some pics from our inauguration party. At first, we present a graphical summary on the delicious snacks and desserts that resemble...

Yesterday's afternoon we had the "official" inauguration of our research activities for all the Max Planck Institute community. A lot of great...

Last week, as the 2018 World Cup was in its last leg, the MPI Campus Soccer Tournament took place. A team from members of the Ley Lab competed, and...

Dr. Elizabeth Johnson, a former postdoct in the Ley Lab, is starting a tenure track position as an Assistant Professor in the Division of Nutritional...

We would like to welcome the new post-docs that have joined our lab this semester. They are:

• Dr. James Marsh, working on bacterial sphingolipids in...

It is a great pleasure for us to welcome Prof. Kina Thackray and Profs. Scott Kelley, from UC San Diego and San Diego State University, respectively,...

Last June Dr. Victor Schmidt and Liam Fitzstevens successfully completed a sampling expedition in Vietnam, carried out in collaboration with the...

A new research article from Dr. Angela C. Pole and collaborators from our lab entitled "Human salivary amylase gene copy number impacts oral and gut...

We are proud to announce the publication of our most recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Dr. Tony Walters and...

Last week, Ruth Ley received the Ernst Jung Prize for Medicine 2018. The prestigious award -shared with Prof. Marco Prinz from the University Hospital...

Ruth Ley was recently featured in the BBC documentary The Second Genome, where she talked about the role of the microbiome in human health. The Second...

A research article from Sara Di Rienzi titled Resilience of small intestinal beneficial bacteria to the toxicity of soybean oil fatty acids has just...

It was a great pleasure for us to host Prof. Dominic Campopiano, from the School of Chemistry of the University of Edinburgh. He and his group have...

www.keystonesymposia.org/18X4

Ruth Ley and Stacey Heaver presented work on sphingolipids in host-microbiome interactions at the Keystone...

to Stacey Heaver and Elizabeth Johnson for the publication of their review "Sphingolipids in host-microbiobial interactions".

Victor celebrating with the MPI/CERMEL field team and some study participants after a successful day near Waka National Park, Gabon.

2017 was an exciting year for the new department. We grew a lot! This year we welcomed:

Selma Atan, Hagay Enav, Liam Fitzstevens, Claudia Frick,...

Please click here.

We are very proud to announce that former Ley Lab post-doc Angela Poole started her new position as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in Nutritional...

The Tübingen IMPRS is now accepting applications – this is one way to obtain a PhD via the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology. Students...

This month we are excited to welcome two new post-docs: Carolin Kolmeder and Victor Schmidt have joined our new group in Tübingen.

Congratulations to Lars Angenent: 2017 Humboldt Professor at the University of Tübingen! Now that’s a 2-body solution!!

http://www.humboldt-professur...

Our review of the links between host genetics and the microbiome is out in Science:

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/352/6285/532

 Ley Lab to become Department of Microbiome Science at MPI Tubingen @RuthLeyMicro

Ruth E. Ley, PhD, to become new director at the MPI for Developmental Biology bit.ly/1PvVNQi via @maxplanckpress @RuthLeyMicro

We are excited to welcome two new PhD students this Fall. Jess Sutter is a lab veteran who will be investigating the beneficial aspects of specific...

Cornell Fine Arts & Microbiome Art Show!! Opening Reception at The Ink Shop

Friday, September 4, 5-8pm | September 4 – September 29, 2015

Most of Ley Lab! Spring 2015.

Congratulations to Julia Goodrich for winning a 2015 Harold M. Weintraub Graduate Student Award!! She and the other awardees will participate in the...

Congratulations to Angela Poole for winning a spot at the University of Michigan’s Early Career Scientist Symposium, March 28th in Ann Arbor,...

This paper now in Press at Nature! Another reason to stop eating junk food:

Chassaing, B., O. Koren, J. Goodrich, A. Poole, S. Srinivasan, R. E. Ley...

Now published in Cell- check it out!

Congratulations to Julia, to Jill, and to the rest of the team!

Check out Omry Koren’s pregnancy microbiome study (Cell, 2010) cited in Ed Yong’s piece in the New York Times:

The Ley Lab won two awards at the meeting of the International Society for Microbial Ecology (ISME) in Seoul, South Korea, in July. Ruth Ley won the...

Julia Goodrich’s landmark study of the gut microbiomes of twins will be published in Cell in early November. This paper includes a heritability ...

We are very excited to have Tony Walters join us for a post-doctoral position. Tony got his Ph.D. with Rob Knight at the University of Colorado at...

Ley Lab Members @ASM Beneficial Microbes: From left to right – Angela Poole, Zach Henseler, Shao-Pei Chou, Ruth Ley, Liz Johnson, Jill Waters and...

Congratulations to our graduates!

This Fall we are welcoming Dr. Jill Waters to our lab as a new post-doc. Jill obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois where she worked...

We have many things to celebrate of late, including:

Dr. Cullender graduated in May 2013 with his Ph.D. Tyler’s work showed that innate and adaptive...

Here are some of the news stories (scroll over source for link):

“Pregnancy alters resident gut microbes”, by Monya Baker, Nature, Aug. 2, 2012. ...

We are joined by two new post-doctoral associates, Sara DiRienzi and Sha Li.  Sara is developing a project on microbial modulation of host ...

Ruth is awarded the 2011 CALS Award for Outstanding Accomplishments in Early Achievement:

“Ruth E. Ley, Department of Microbiology, for her important...

Congratulations to Tyler Cullender and Ashwana Fricker for passing their A-exams, they are now Ph.D. candidates!

We’ve had a number of papers come...

More news: Ruth was awarded a Packard Foundation Fellowship to study the co-evolution of gut microbiotas with the human host.  This 5-yr grant will...

Our analysis of the developing infant gut microbiome was published in PNAS and written up in the New Scientist.

Other recent publications with...